The Scant Veil of Jean-François Guiton’s Work
Marc Mercier
in Catalogue “Hésitations des sens”, C.A.C. de Basse-Normandie, Hérouville-Saint-Clair, 1997
The sea creates the shore when it ebbs, observed the poet Hölderlin.
In this the same as saying that absence is the condition of an image? Let us unconditionally accept this hypothesis, which we might call an axiom, and try to stake out a line of thought in Jean-François Guiton's video work. Where does this statement derive its legitimacy? From a work. The work that was commissioned from me in the same way as these very words that are now being written. To wit, a work involving the writing of a few introductory lines for each of the videos made by Guiton. This is a task that has endangered all attempts to denote and interpret what is in effect simply presented, to be seen and listened to. Meaning is forever slipping away. Towards what fate or thought do we direct ourselves when, for example, we have finished noting that Guiton uses repetition in Holzstücke, Handle with care, Fussnote and La longue marche? Or when he creates obstacles for the eye in Pour faire le portrait d'un oiseau, La tache and Voile? It must be admitted that meaning creates an image capable of being conceived... by ebbing.
So Guiton's work can only be understood in the state of power, pure evolution, and evolution-cum-meaning unfettered by any duty to clarity and intelligibility. The image prompts the eye, but this creates an obstacle when it comes to reading the image, not because of any hidden symbolism simply calling for discovery and interpretation, which would reduce the work to being no more than the ineffectual drive belt of an idea, but because the crux of the impossible reading of an image involves being blind to form and deaf to the voice of time. Nothing we already know helps us to shed light on the enigma of an image. There is no communication possible between an artist and an onlooker by way of his work. It is the lack of communication which, by creating possibility from the impossible, sets truth loose in a work. The image, to quote Paul Klee, is a state of « being nothing and nothing being »; it « remains forever weight-and measureless ». This is a point of paramount importance, because, without it, we cannot put paid to the capitalist, accountancy - and management - oriented economy of the production of images (and its distribution!), the economy which forces the pace so that everything may be connected, an object with a price, an artwork with a meaning. It is the reign of forced harmony and abstract equivalence which (poorly) conceals its contradictions, and denies its missing part. Something will always elude us. In Voile, a ship's sail is filmed very close-up, like a face (the Close-Up was invented to this end by Hollywood). The expressions of the fabric (pleats, movements) point to a dramatic situation, a tension, the worst. The worst is precisely what is invariably hidden from understanding (all you have to do is think of Auschwitz and the impossible nature of the accounts of those who survived, and of that void in which negationist and revisionist discourse is swallowed up). It lets what is offered to the ear float... In this instance, we shall call this missing part, what the eye cannot see despite the attraction of promptings both acoustic (siren, bird, a sound reminiscent of an electrocardiogram, a cry, bomb blasts, sobbing...) and visual (an open hand in water, floating corpses...), the Horrible, implying a figure that cannot be depicted. All the acoustic and visual fragments, which here upset the impossible image (a sail filmed close up!), do not shed light on some view held about (or against) war. On the contrary, they are vectors of a process that renders opaque; they take the broad sense of any meaning. They are exhausting, excesses of meaning which spill out of the frame of the image. Let us put it another way: they are, strictly speaking, scraps, bits and piece of equipment, human scraps, scraps of meaning... What remains from war are effects of meaninglessness, or nonsense.
Is Voile a militant video? Yes, in the sense that it pinpoints a commitment to a cause that is totally lost in advance. All types of depiction of the Horrible are destined to complete destruction. « Sail », Paul Klee might say, « gives a glimpse of the invisible ».
Coup de vent/Gust of wind offers us another example of this commitment to loss. In a few shots, using metonymic procedures (wind, windmill sails, a hand pulling on a glove, a spear, a neighing noise), the setting of the drama is set up. We are in the presence of Cervantes' mythical hero, Don Quixote de la Mancha. What is he doing? He is stirring wind. So is he crazy? Yes, if we gauge what he is doing against criteria of profitabilitiy and efficiency, if we subject the present to the future. No, if we reckon that the duels in which he becomes involved (against windmills, the wind, a voice, and war like rattles) are surges of power and sheer resistance.
Guiton has skipped over all kinds of anecdote, psychological factor and even literary reference, and hung on just to the quintessence of Don Quixote's gesture, which can only be appreciated in relation to its immediate effects. The whistling of the wind, whipped by the spear, the reflected light on the actor's weapon and sweater. Don Quixote does not have a role. Nor does he even have a place in the power structure. He does not have a programme. His is a libertarian struggle. As such, it is not aimed at good. it is its own justification... Cervantes' Don Quixote (II. 58) remarks to Sancho Panza : « Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has given to men. Nothing equals it, neither the treasures that the earth stores in its bosom, nor those that the sea hides in its deepest depths. For freedom, as for honour, you can and you should risk your life... » This struggle is the same as Guiton's, as it emerges in his work constructed, as we have already seen, around a fundamental void, around wind. He risks his art. Fighting against windmills is like conjuring up a completeness that is inaccessible to any posited act, an infinite reality which, by definition, cannot be captured, grasped and dominated.
SoCoup de vent helps us to broach an essential dimension of Guiton's work, and one that we have separated from power (Art, Artist, Work, Knowledge, Law...): power. « Power, in the words of Miguel Benasayag, is pure evolution, essentially different from any advent. »Its contradiction stems from the fact that it can only be grasped through its shortcomings and its excesses, when it becomes fiction (Guiton directs himself in the part of Don Quixote), a fiction which, it so happens, is presented like the structure of truth. But is truth not a split-second of falsehood?
We have seen how, in Guiton's work, an image can form a barrier to all forms of representation. We can see that it is an excess of absence, that power incorporates the image in a pure evolution which frees it from any end purpose, and that it becomes part of an infinite process. Let us now take a look at Intermezzo ou les chaises musicales, for example. Chairs shake, quiver and, over and over again, start to topple forward. The rhythmic musical aspect (introduced straightaway by the title) of the repetitive interplay of the chairs' collapse should not disguise what is at work when repetition is posited as an act of writing. This is an almost inaugural act in Guiton's work, with Holzstücke, back in 1982. We might even say that everything started by being repeated.
What are we repeating? Something that cannot be started over again? The same wind never wafts twice over the same cherry branch, wrote the poet Nazim Hikmet. Guiton does not add a second, third or fourth chair collapse to the first, but he carries the first one to the power of n. In Clio, Charles Péguy explained that it was not the Festival of the Federation that commemorated or represented the taking of the Bastille, but that it was the taking of the Bastille that celebrated and repeated, in advance, all Federations. It is Holzstücke that internalizes and repeats, in advance, all the repetitive modules which will subsequently be used in other works produced by Guiton, bearing in mind that the terms of a repetition can only ever be oddities. Guiton has experimented with this impossible aspect of the repetition of the Same (each term is irreplaceable: you do not replace a real twin by his brother) in Handle with care. Two years later, he tried to re-test his inaugural work, Holzstücke. Guiton is sitting in front of a video screen where the so-called inaugural scene takes place. Filming yourself re-viewing what once was is like trying to represent repetition. The filmed screen, on which we can re-see a wooden sculpture striving to present the spectacle of its destruction, seems to usher in the technical solution for seeing a repetition of the Same at work. If extreme resemblance and perfect equivalence were achieved, there would still be a difference in nature always separating two situations. Repeating is expressing an eternity versus permanence, versus law. It is transgressing.
So, in its turn, repetition is a mask, a veil that secures our attention, absorbs our eye just like blotting-paper absorbs ink, and then diverts it towards the point where its cycle comes full circle. If the onlooker may be taken in by this (this is the law, the magic of the spectacle), Guiton is not, and proof of this lies in a work such as Handle with care. The memory (of a previously produced work) is not carefully tidied away in its box. By this failed repetition of the Same, Guiton declares that all that is repeated is the different. This, all the same, is the nature of what we nowadays call art, of what we hope that it is. But then what does the word repetition not adequately say? It does not adequately say what the process of artistic creation is, as applied in particular by Guiton.
Guiton is faithful to Holzstücke. Repeating in a process of fidelity is dealing with the possible aspect of the situation of this inaugural work to the end. It is being faithful to an event originating from an act which has broken with the logic of the situation that preceded it. Repetition is thus a renewal.
Absence, power, repetition. Guiton’s videos create a crisis. A tension. An excess. The matter of the materials with which he works is not, for example, subjected to their natural resonance. The matter is divided, the One turns into Two. The matter is turned into light matter. The sound goes beyond its limits and becomes a noise-sound. In Der Käfig/The Cage, an obsessive larsen is modulated with heavy breathing. In Fussnote/Footnote, we witness an overspill, a foot strives desperately to free itself from the grip of the ground to escape from the frame of the screen, mission impossible. An image can only cling to its surface, which is not the case with sound. Crises give rise to resistance. Guiton’s art, like Janys, is a two-headed body. It is creation and destruction, fertility and murder. He invests art and announces its end. When Charlie Chaplin talks, he dies (« Birth of the talking movie: the death of Charlie Chaplin »). Resisting is dying in fine form. Guiton’s work announces an impossible factor of art, it presages catastrophe (inaudible larsen, imbalance of a pile of chairs or a wooden sculpture…), the recurrence of the image (in Der Käfig, the artist’s face is duplicated and tries to reform itself with ever more violent thrusts), shaking (the chairs in Intermezzo quiver)… a mortal hence forward is suggested. It maintains that the experiment of art is a testing combination of pleasure and displeasure. It bans all contemplation except, perhaps, at the end of Stand 20-Paar 8 when, after ten minutes or so of tension, Michael Witlatschil withdraws and leaves his sculpture balanced, sufficient into itself, living on its own forces.
By going beyond the possibles of his art, by brushing the boundaries of the tolerable, by announcing (without ever actually saying as much) the possible end of art (we could extend his 1993 proposition, the birth of the talking movie: the death of Charlie Chaplin: the end of the cinema: the destruction of art…), he does not set himself up as a prophet, with alleged knowledge (what does it matter if this is so or not). Rather, he capsizes the moral law of art, in an ironical way. He deals ironically with the principles, those which open the doors of both the major cultural institutions and the specialized columns of prestigious periodicals. He deals ironically with the Duty to defend the aesthetic standards of official contemporary art. His repetitions are, in this sens, marks of irony.
But this is not all. His repetitions are also witty marks. They violate the laws of nature, gravity and equilibrium. Planks whirl about, chairs topple into the void without necessarily touching the ground. In La longue marche, a one-legged person moves not by hopping along but with the leg motion of somebody with two legs… Guiton’s wit hails from the consequences of repetition. Banality cocks a snook at the law, it becomes exceptional, it stands apart.
Irony and wit in repetition (we know that Marx had already discovered that laughter was revolutionary) constrat with all forms of generality. They rip the veil of Culture, they affirm an act of creation, they split both convention and non-convention (which are, objectively, the two sides of the same coin) so that desire is filtered.
Desire might, as it happens, be the true maker of Surface sensible, if he knew how to initial his work. What is more, it is there to see, this essay on Cy Twombly is signed by a threesome: Jean-François Guiton, Karin Stempel and Ursula Wevers. A group creation can only be envisaged if it is «pushed » by a force that outstrips, outdoes and permeates the authors.
The three of them form a desirous machine-let us not be sidetracked- because they are faced with a work (Cy Twombly’s) which is lacking, which dos away with itself beneath the eye, which is just pure sensibility materialized (by excess) by a surface that is outlined, scratched and written. This effective presence of absence (this is in no way a possible definition of desire) refers unfailingly to a Guiton video titled La tache/The Stain, where obliteration gives a glimpse of textures, skin and textiles which peep through the perceptible surface of the screen.
The eye creates the tactile by withdrawing, the poet Desirous would say.
Marc Mercier, September 1997