"In front of the corum..."

 

Jacques IMBERT

 

In front of the Corum, I picture a man--tall and handsome: what else?--haranguing the crowd and asking people to come in and see from within what makes things simple, smooth and compact, what fills cracks, builds, and makes reality from appearances. What, by diffracting things, explains it all, everything wherein and whereby all is in order, "universal remedy long sought-after against all manner of sickness", wrote Jean-Paul in 1783, in his piece in praise of stupidity. Those sicknesses that hail from the thirst for knowledge that has bared us from Eden.

The man announces countless witnesses, among whom those from the 19th century and the start of this century, experts in "bourgeoisophie"--Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lautr‚amont, Flaubert, and even L‚on Bloy and his Ex‚gŠse des lieux communs ("When the bourgeois, now retired from business, marries off his last daughter, he is encouraging the fine arts...").

Not forgetting Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and the man readily described as the bedrock--the hypostasis--of stupidity, Tribulat Bonhomet, strangler of swans, in quest of the beauty of a final (swan) song, who contrives to use earthquakes to exterminate the mortal race of poets.

The man lists, pell-mell, more recent names: Blanchot, Deleuze, Barthes, Baudrillard, Rosset, Nancy, and many more...

And I think of the sentence from a letter written to me a while ago by Didier Malgor, who, along with Christian Gaussen, instigated this conference: "I should like this conference to come up with questions about those moments of silence in the creative process, those moments where you have no option but to stop for a while to become acclimatized to otherness and adversity, which is like the accepted idea, and stupidity. These forms of silence are not part of ineffability, revelation and intuition, like magic and empathy; rather, they are part of something that pushes-and-pulls".

Something that pushes and pulls, pro and con. Who among us could reckon themselves a stranger to stupidity? For it poses an on-going threat to the most transparent of intentions. Intelligence consists, a priori, in dodging, withdrawing, and being there at the right moment. It has actually often led to testing out a heavy presence, with a sensation of immediacy, which always sets itself up in the same place. This, according to Lacan, is one of the features of the real, another being "talking to yourself". There is cause for concern, here. At its highest level, intelligence probably comes round to not leaving things at that, to experiencing a mobility so subtly that it takes on all the appearance of madness. And the most refined form of intelligence is undoubtedly the type that madness takes to its uttermost limit.

Terror of stupidity reigns more stridently where people are not in a position to let themselves go, as is the case with those ship's captains who run aground in shallow water. Here, a lack of vigilance is stupid. A lack of vigilance, exactingness and love. Val‚ry sets forth this "Carnot principle" thus: "A fool does not become a wit, but a wit contains a fool who sometimes comes to the fore and sometimes carries the day". And Dionys Mascolo wrote in his 1980-1982 Notebooks: "An intelligence that does not mistrust itself risks dangerously simplifying everything. The haste with which it winds things up leads to error, or, more rudely put, has it brushing against stupidity. There is no mystery. It is the stupidity of intelligence itself".

Withdrawing. Being concerned, and not weighing things up. Marthe Robert says of Kafka that he never wrote anything stupid. Is Kafka, who read Flaubert, thus exempt in advance from all error of appraisal? What might this mean? That a stupidity-free world would be Kafkaesque? Literary, in an absolute sense?

 

Among the most obsessive manifestations of stupidity are the accepted idea, the mental ready-to-wear syndrome, and the doxy. The idea our age pursues, sometimes at the risk of replacing traditional representations, those "images in the head" as Lippman put it, by other no less restrictive images. The notion is not involved in any consensus in the social sciences. A single constant seems to embrace all definitions: the accepted idea stems from a pre-construct rooted in collective, group and culture.

There can be no certainty, furthermore, that an accepted idea is always an idea. An idea presupposes battle-ground and contradiction, and only takes shape after conflicts resolved by conscience. Thought never pushes ahead in an atmosphere of calm and simplicity. Ideas do not have precedents. Ideas only arise, as Fran‡ois Dagognet puts it, to soothe a drama.

So the accepted idea is what the group structure cuts out and freezes for us, without any attempt at critical discernment. If art schools--if I may come to them at this early stage--are frequent victims of them, this is doubtless because they crystallize two types of fantasy--those to do with art and those to do with teaching.

Just now, Henri Talvat discussed Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. It is tempting to pursue this and draw up a listing of all those definitive assertions designed to underscore that schools of fine arts are no longer tooting their own horn, assertions which at times aim at having the effect of schools of fine arts no longer trumpet their own fanfare.

ELSEWHERE. The topicality or modernity of art is elsewhere.

ARTISTS. The best artists have not been through any art school.

LEARNING. You cannot learn art.

JOBLESSNESS. Art schools are factories of joblessness.

DEGREES. These have neither validity nor national recognition.

ELITE. Contemporary art is elitist, cut off from reality. So art schools are private and earmarked for the initiated.

TEACHERS. Failed artists.

TEACHING. Art schools do not dispense any real higher education.

ABROAD. French art schools do not bear comparison with schools abroad.

STRONG. There is nothing new or strong in art schools.

CIRCLES. Art schools are cut off from art circles.

PARIS. The only real art schools are in Paris.

Art schools actually steer a course between two images:

--the image of the "Bohemian" places which they no longer are. So they do not satisfy those who would like to see them play a conservative role of resistance to the values attaching to "Fine Arts".

--the image of the high-tech laboratory they are not either, of image engineering inventing the future in a make-believe scenario of special effects, in a fantasy to do with mastering development. So they cannot comfort those who do not like the "ignorance of the future", and would see them embodying an undeniable economic potential on the unambiguous track of progress and worldwide competition.

What is striking, like a kind of massive silence, is first and foremost what is not said, what does not reverberate, contents of courses and classes, workshops and studios, the meaning of works produced, of analyses and commentaries offered, of the stuff of the work carried out in schools, by students and teachers alike.

We have a very superficial knowledge--perhaps we do not really want to know--about what art teaching etches, instils and produces, both individually and socially speaking. There is no spontaneous or immediate communication of this life, even if it may be dense and diversified in its various states, that the art school stirs up, steers and outlines.

Art schools have changed. Nowadays, they embrace a broad range of instruction, they issue certified level III and level II degrees, and they carry on a dialogue with a large number of partners.

They are places of transmission, experimentation, and plurality, open to every aspect of contemporary life, included within a weft of multiple relationships with the art world, universities, and the economic arena.

It is not just a matter, here, of teaching and practising analytical study and approaches, but of encouraging personal expression, and teaching students to formulate concepts and activities that will create poietics.

They are actually a rare model in the educational landscape, helping the student to come by a method of raising issues to do with tools and thoughts in a relationship of theory to practice that probably has no equivalent.

By putting the accent on the need for a society to think about its formal and visual messages, and about how these messages manufacture the breadth of a community's identity, art schools do indeed work at encouraging the possible emergence of artists. But their ambition is to train students, who might subsequently give vent to their talent in diverse areas of activity--train them, that is, on the level of conceptual, technical and technological control. They seem to manage to do this better than many other institutions to judge from how many of their students find professional jobs.

Concepts of educational community, openness to whole environments, diversified partnership, and consideration of issues of information and initiation all attest to the ability of schools to bring different types of logic together, coordinate them all in relation to identified programmes, tangible arrangements, and objects, and define them clearly as active reserves that anticipate social and economic wealth.

If accepted ideas persist in the face of this, and persist at every level, this is also because they can best serve apparent conflicts of interest. Maybe we should re-read Adorno's thinking about the link between the pre-construct and the political.

This said, the doxic statement, the stereotype, is indeed the place where thinking becomes substantiated and is repeated identical to itself. It is Medusa, wrote Barthes, Medusa "who turns those who look at her to stone". Petrification, fascination. And he added: "Where stupidity is concerned, I shall only have the right to say but this: it fascinates me". It is the place where life becomes static, a place associated with death "where there is no body".

The man has finished his performance on the steps of the Corum. You will discuss stupidity in art and art criticism since Bouvard and P‚cuchet (ah, protect the real from all disillusionment!). We shall miss, as is our wont, the lapse of time, the expectation and the process. We shall love at the pace of the fragment, of the smithereen, sometimes of the drip, and perhaps of turbulence. The rest--the nub--will come later. We are in an area where the only thing that is eternal is the circumstantial. The general is the denial of any multifacetted association, it is a simplistic fiction, something akin to a referential prosthesis which only imposes its authority at the price of the exclusion of presence.

You will perhaps impose yours by informing it in all its possible senses with F‚lix F‚n‚on's "three-line story", which something strangely topical allows us to see once again: "A young woman sitting on the ground at Choisy-le Roi. The only word of identity that her amnesia lets her pronounce: "Model".

Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods.

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