After reading the start of a Musil lecture on stupidity given in the 1930s, I can't resist quoting from it:

"Anyone, these days, who would have the audacity to talk about stupidity would be running serious risks: such audacity may actually be interpreted as arrogance, or, in a nutshell, as an attempt aimed at upsetting the development of our age", and he carries on: "If stupidity did not resemble progress, talent, hope and improvement quite so perfectly, nobody would want to be stupid".

This said, it is natural to think that everything has been said. But it is precisely because these words seem to be tailor-made that we are prompted to tackle some checking of our own selves, reassured by the French expression: "Bˆte comme un peintre" or, literally, "As stupid as a painter". Whereas it would be more complicated to broach the argument with the term "Pittore" (Painter), in its Italian sense, which lends it authority and which dictates a way of looking at stupidity cast from too lofty a perch, were it not for the fact that all this authority perished in the 1930s, with Fascism.

Since the 1930s, however, up until the present, time has indeed passed, my own time has passed, and the time of my generation, springing from the stupidity of 1930s' rhetoric, has been weaned in the stupidity of war, for it spent its teenage years in the stupidity of the cold war.

I remember the 1950s as being sad years; they resembled the 1930s in an elderly version, full of debates whose intent was to smother repression.

Abstract artists, realist artists, purists, committed and concrete artists, functionalists, serial artists, traditionalists, progressive artists... while they started all over again to make still lifes or little squares, they all had their memory blemished by horrible things, and many, too, were responsible for these horrible things. But the most ridiculous were those who wore existential grimaces, just as before the war they had sported muscles and banners.

What came out of this situation was a callus, a callus that grew thicker with time--a callus on the sensors of stupidity.

If the Enlightenment wound up in the century of melancholy, it was logical enough the century of melancholy should wind up in the century of stupidity, due to the fact--as Musil noted--that what is involved is something resembling progress.

Except that the sign was reversed.

Previously, it was a duty of art to set up all manner of quotients: religiosity, eroticism, technique, language, thought, sensibility, feeling, observation, gesture, politics... while, nowadays, it seems that there is a trend towards pointing to any type of minima quotients. But what might also be involved is a repeated irresponsibility, or a calcification of feeling, politics, observation, religiosity, gesture, thought, eroticism, technology, and language.

But any external position in relation to stupidity is inappropriate, just as it is inappropriate to take up a position against a handicap. And, given that an imperfect work of art is nothing other than a handicapped work of art, it is not good to stress artistic stupidity. All the more so because we find it in successful works, or works at least reckoned to be successful. For if modern stupidity exists, these works must remain within us in an exemplary way.

I shall now take two masterpieces to illustrate this argument:

Guernica for sensibility, Brillo for intelligence.

When I was still a kid, we gathered in winter in the warmth of a stable to listen to nightmarish stories, told by old timers: with Guernica, we are very close to images which would plunge me into fantasy, my eyes wide open. An illustration of an histoire noire.

Too little for too much.

To make a pile of boxes the outermost limit of an idea, while a box is always regarded as the starting point for deciding about a subject.

Brillo seems to be to be too much for too little.

If you skim off intelligence, all that remains is sensibility; if you skim off sensibility, all that remains is intelligence. As the result of a strange economy or parsimony for these two centuries, art has felt itself obliged to skim off one or the other. The succession of such actions has done away with any possible synthesis, and left us with a clean slate. It is on the clean slate that people have been plugging their mixtures.

Modern stupidity is indifference, not to say enthusiastic indifference.

Acclaim is a cocktail where Enthusiasm is mixed with Indifference, for, on the one hand, things are as they are, there is no longer a great deal of faith or hope, which is why indifference is regarded as insurmountable, and on the other hand somebody said that everything starts from enthusiasm, so enthusiasm to the fore--which is invariably an act of generosity, from which we swiftly expect an act of recognition. In other words, all this has no logic other than a psychological logic, but because none of us has weapons with which to defend logic, psychology knows very well how to defend itself all on its own.

I, too, started to queue for a little recognition when, in the 1960s or thereabouts, I brought the onlooker into play--he was then called the "pleasure-seeker"--as one of the components of a work of art. And I thought I was doing something sincere and generous. I realized right away that, as a good modern artist, I stole something substantial from the work: intelligence and sensibility, and gave them to any old person--to the modern spectator, in a hurry and enthusiastically indifferent. I am possibly still living on this error of judgement or on this "cattle rustling", but this in no way detracts from the fact that there is something criminal about all this and that there is something immensely tiring about living this situation in a dignified way.

But the most famous cocktail is undoubtedly the ready made, the cocktail that implies dependence and habituation. Its association with archaeology ennobles it beyond everything else, its resolve in free will allows it to negotiate the pit existing between experience and transcendental speculation. A shudder that only an amateur can allow himself.

It is only recently that the breed of the amateur has been selected--a cross between leisure and predisposition, a real cocktail between determination and powerlessness.

"There are no professionals in art any more!", goes hand in hand with "Art is made for the less gifted!".

When I was a kid, we used the expression "Arms stolen from the farm" for less gifted people.

The century that started out with "as stupid as a painter" ends up with "arms stolen from art".

Here we are holding forth while the populace continues to laugh at us.

But this time around, it might well be right, given that the amateur is a man of the people who makes art to have a laugh.

And up to this point everything is fine, or at least this is what it looks like, or this is what we want people to think; except that there is a shadow hanging larger and larger over us, the shadow of boredom. For the amateur--and it's very nice of him--is boring, he is always boring, and he's boring above all because he's an embarrassment. To the point of letting us down, he embarrasses us with his amateurism, his altogether personal enthusiasm, and his request to take part. His untrammelled optimism oozes tragedy through every pore. Behind his art, you sense a desperate attempt at redemption, more psychological than social, but more social than ideological, and more ideological that really definitive.

Artistic amateurism, in this latter half of the century in particular, seems to be the grave of the 19th century class struggle, the settling of accounts with liberal materialism.

In his introduction to The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: "Revealing art and concealing the artist is the aim of art"; How are we to reconcile this with the amateur's empassioned self-promotion?

The other day, in Frankfurt, I once again raised the issue in front of Friedrick and Caroline Goes Upstairs, Degas with Le stupre, and Vermeer with The Geographer. We agreed that the intelligence of normality or the ordinary and the extraordinariness of art, there is a kind of boundary occupied by stupidity, which protects either territory from becoming contaminated.

Milan, 13 October 1998

Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

Any old thing by any old body

Michel Frizot

Photographic automatism and amateur praxis

The stupidity of Bouvard and P‚cuchet is often a stupidity of common opinion, or of no opinion. It is also a stupidity in actuality (collecting, copying) which has no justification, and repeats automatic gestures, simply because they have to be repeated. It is a matter, here, of envisaging a form of turn-of-the-century stupidity in imagery or, an art of stupidity. The whole of photographic praxis, from its very origins, governed by an automatism of artefact, actually seems to be on the payroll of the Flaubertian principles of stupidity. But it is more specifically at the end of the century, with the figure of the amateur, that photography subscribed to the logic of the copy, stencils, automatic reproduction, unintentional invention and the acceptance of everything that occurs in the form of an image.

This does not consist in running the stupid image, or the image of stupidity, to earth, but in unearthing the stupidity image, the product of a clockwork application, the uncontrolled outcome of the stupid application of a stupid "contraption": the repetition of a learnt gesture (pressing a button, the button that triggers). This is the realm of sameness, of repetition, or of the personal intervention that is diverted and bungled, and has come to nothing; an intervention that nevertheless brings on a differentiation of the image, almost a "new image", a form that did not exist beforehand. Here, doubtless, lies a source of modern art, or new attitudes towards the production of images, as towards the acceptance of images that are not canonical, and produced fortuitously by an installation. These considerations might easily apply to contemporary activities, particularly in the area of so-called "visual" photography (photographie plasticienne), reigned over, often indiscriminately, by the combined clich‚s of automatism and the absence of intent. The iconic metamorphoses of the end of the 19th century involve, in any event, the whole of 20th century and contemporary art.

An understanding of these transformations calls first and foremost for one or two technical explanations, peculiar to photography. This latter appeared in 1839--it was then called the daguerreotype--but it was in the 1850s that these techniques assumed a broader scope, which included the negative concept. It was, incidentally, at this moment that Flaubert was working on Bouvard et P‚cuchet. From the moment photography was invented, it stood apart from other representational systems already existing (painting, drawing, engraving) because of its instrumental nature. Otherwise put, to produce these images, you had to own and make use of a device, an instrument, deriving from the camera obscura, the dark room, and it was enough to know how to use this device in its twofold--optical and chemical--workings. Without any manual intervention on the receiving surface, this operation produces an image which stands out for the way it is totally faithful to the referent--it is a perfect imitative image. I would remind you that in the 19th century, this image took a relatively long time to capture in relation to instantaneousness--the snapshot, in modern parlance (poses could still last for several seconds, and there were many subsequent operations to undertake before a print was obtained), but this period of time was actually very short when compared with the time required to produce other images, even if they were less faithful to the original (painting springs to mind, in particular). So photography introduced a new relationship between the amount of work provided and the quality of likeness of the work--an image with a great likeness for not a great deal of actual work. Whence the shift of the function of the artefact, of the mimesis towards reproduction and duplication, with a reduced degree of necessary and voluntary effort (including the intellectual effort). This marks the start of a debate, which, incidentally, is still in progress, about the legitimacy and value of this new "art", and those producing it. Not forgetting that photographic pictures once and for all shift the issue of pictorial representation (in relation not only to the portrait and landscape, but also to fiction).

So photographers are regularly taken (we can see this in all the diatribes against the photo) for idlers, imbeciles, asses and scatter-brains (Daumier's caricature of the length of the pose titled "Patience is the virtue of asses"). And the facts do not always contradict this view, either because those who plunge into photography are quite uneducated, or because they have made their first [mistakes....?] in painting, and are thus suspected of covering up their artistic failures behind photography (this is the case with the early photographers like NŠgre, Le Secq, Le Gray, and so on). In the eyes of the public, critics, and journalists, photography is part and parcel of stupidity, a form of popular stupidity ushered in by a lack of understanding about new technical practices, which are admitted without any knowledge about the way they work, or about their raisons d'ˆtre. The 19th century caricature fully developed those na‹ve figures displaying their ignorance and their illusions about photographic operations (at a distance or post-mortem...).

At this stage, an observation is undoubtedly due which deals directly with the overall topic of this conference: one of the sources of stupidity in the 19th century resides in the lack of understanding about techniques and technologies, which, it is worth reminding ourselves, were the paramount issue of the century. Suffice it to mention the steam engine and all the industrial mechanization that it entailed, or electricity and its applications which would become ubiquitous in the 1880s. Suffice it, too, to remember that for the century's popularizers photography was the third of the age's major novelties, alongside the steam engine and electricity.

Like all technologies, photographic practices have developed a great deal, and what was important here, above all, was the second essential phase which occurred in the 1880s. This had to do with the discovery of very light-sensitive products (silver gelatinobromide), making very fast shots and exposures possible, which would in due course be called snapshots. The fact was that the automatic work of incorporating the image in the camera required a very short time indeed, down to 1/1000th of a second. This was at once inconceivable and hitherto unknown. Here, we shall just focus on two particularly visible effects of this, from the 1890s on, which have since consistently hallmarked photographic attitudes: the automatization of operations and the creation of new, blissful images, which might be described as "innocent". Automatization and innocence would inform the manifestations of stupidity, in Flaubert's view.

Technically speaking, it is enough to know that silver gelatinobromide, which is a very photosensitive substance, involved many changes in photographic equipment and practices: the introduction of complementary accessories quantifying the--very short--exposure time of the shutter; reduction of the size of dark rooms, or even their miniaturization; the uselessness of making the camera totally motionless during the actual exposure, which in turn made it possible to move forward with hand-held cameras--these were portable and held at midriff- or eye-level; the incognito factor of the exposure with the introduction of very small cameras, and cameras camouflaged as parcels, binoculars and even ties; approximate focusing and framing using a fairly cumbersome and not very accurate view-finder, replacing the technique of focusing on the focusing screen at the back of the chamber; and the immediate availability of the exposure or shot, because the chamber is quickly put in the "cocked" position. These simplifications actually ushered in a disappearance of technology, an elimination of process, and a new category of camera-users acquainted with just these simple operations: amateur photographers. These amateurs did not have the same standards and intentions as professional photographers. The height of simplification occurred in 1889, with the Kodak, a square black box containing another novel feature, the flexible film instead of glass; but more importantly it did not involve any exposure adjustment, or diaphragm adjustment, or focusing, because everything was set in advance. Even the development and printing of the film were done by the manufacturer, to whom the camera was returned when it had taken the hundred authorized (circular) shots. The slogan "You press the button, we do the rest" marked the new order of photography--an obvious pointer to a shift towards a technological form of stupidity (ignorance and indifference). The effects on the nature and "quality" of the pictures taken were considerable, for there was now a brand new production system dictating amateur and popular standards which were not previously admissible: the picture was only produced as a result of the amateur's goodwill, and in the split second when he or she pressed the button, randomly or otherwise; the image reproduced solely what was in the field of vision and axis of the camera, at that particular moment, and based on methods peculiar to the camera; criteria governing the choice of the picture's subject were greatly relaxed, and defined by a lowly culture, in references to humour, games, improvisation and wait-and-see, rather than to the tradition of meaningful imagery. Everything was worthy of being photographically recorded, by lying in wait for the subject and running it (or him or her) to earth, or opting for the off-the-cuff technique, at the whim of the amateur photographer's moods. Anybody at all could, potentially, produce pictures of anything whatsoever. At the turn of the century, and up until the 1920s, advertising stressed the fact that photography was becoming accessible to women, in particular...

These practices were definitely part and parcel of a form of stupidity of reproduction, with no specific criteria, of what happened to be before a person's eyes, the way Bouvard and P‚cuchet indiscriminately reproduced all the writings that came into their hands. But the stupidity of the image derived from the fact that technology no longer held the reins, even though it had been automatized, and from the role of chance and unintentional creation resulting therefrom. Automatization in fact meant following an optimum programme, and complying with rules and regulations, without which there would be a breakdown or flop, total or in part. Here, stupidity was the non-incorporation of technology, technological "unreason", and the non-conformity of the actual practice of photography in terms of the rules imposed by automaticity. This, in turn, gave rise to non-conforming imagery and pictures, but images and pictures all the same, acknowledged as legitimate, and included as such in the vast category of images where they produced a phenomenon of destabilization. On the one hand, this implied the creation of stereotypes which are still common currency among amateurs, and the creation of an iconic antidoxy: stupidity was producer and creator alike, both in the way it kept to the most commonplace rules and also in the way it rejected them.

The architecture and language of photographic images were henceforth associated with these novel procedures, which is clear to see both in the subject and in the iconic nature of the picture, using strictly photographic effects. There are obvious examples of this in the photographs of Pierre Bonnard, taken in about 1900, which played very freely with the framing and centering (figures left out of the frame) and with the poses and postures of children at play--physical imbalances that were not easy to decipher. This somewhat static painter embraced, with no qualms at all, the dynamism of the instant--snapshot--and dynamic properties of framing and centering, as well as the soft focus and fade-out of forms.

An acceptance of new inner structures within the image, in about 1900, passed by way of photography. A similarly free appraisal of what was "photographic" crops up in the work of Paul Martin, a Frenchman who had settled in London, and an amateur or semi-professional photographer (street scenes, beaches photographed incognito). The same applies to Jacques-Henri Lartigue who, from the early years of this century, never shrunk from defying the classic operational regulations, and coming up with pictures that were extremely close to personal experience and physical sensations: distortions of speed, cutting the subject by the frame, varying forms of soft focus and blur caused by the natural dynamism of the subject, which was never thwarted.

The case of the painter Edvard Munch, who took many photographs, many of them self-portraits, is extremely revealing: he accepted photography as a process parallel to the act of painting, but with its specific limitations. He too also worked with a simple amateur camera, which he would place on a piece of furniture and then release the shutter before putting himself in the field of vision during the exposure time, which might be ten or twenty seconds. The graphic data of photography, such as the obliteration of the subject, or the overlay of shots, were accepted as natural, and even as revealing a way of being present in space, like a ghost.

In the period from 1886 to 1896, Strindberg was also a keen photographer, whose self-portraits were technically very successful, even if the subject was at times odd, or very narcissistic. But his experiments carried out in the 1890s rather show the projection of a technical fantasy of the direct impression rather than the shot itself--either with his crystallographies (kinds of photogrammes of frost on window panes, in winter), or with his celestographs (so-called pictures of stars which would taken by night by leaving the light-sensitive plate in the open air, involving no use of any camera). The light dots, supposedly images of stars, were merely impurities in the plate, or effects of chemical over-exposure which Strindberg nevertheless interpreted using scientific criteria. His belief (in success) thus lent the image meaning, all on its own.

Here we are entering a specific area: the discovery by people making unintentional images, which are the product either of a non-dominated technique, or of a misuse of procedures; it is the image of flaw or defect--or the image of defection--, the image caused by a defect in operation or procedure, to poorly adapted conditions for the shot, in relation to the rational way the camera works. What is commonly called a failure or a misfire, but a misfire that nevertheless produces an image, as strange as it is unforeseen. Photography, a common place since the end of the 19th century (or middle-of-the-road art, as Pierre Bourdieu called it) is also the arena of the most radical sort of pictorial breaks. For these images of negligence would be seen, rendered banal, acculturated, and incorporated in a common estate, and in the common place of imagery. Their method of appearance is nothing if not very "natural" for a turn-of-the-century amateur. A picture titled "Variations of development based on the subject" in La pratique de la photographie instantan‚e by E. Fripet (1899), shows the difficulty of mastering certain operations, to do with chemistry in particular. In four pages, the same book develops the analysis of "image defects" and "sundry accidents" (borrowed from Albert Londe's La photographic moderne, 1896): distortions, double images, solarization etc. And this does not encompass the deliberate pranks and incompetent negligence of the operator, giving rise to other forms and new perceptions.

It is quite hard to come up with a classification of these image defects: double images (an accident to do with the shot itself) where one figure seems to be transparent, with soft focus effects on a closer ground, vertical focusing attempts to record a flight of starlings in the form of vague dots in oblique compositions, with inappropriate cuts of poorly framed and centered figures. A whole new language is used, soon to be recognized and deciphered, understood as conveying a perceptual truth, because it is linked with the functional processes of the camera. "Petty stupidities" producing innocent pictures--shamelessly and unregretfully about any old thing--actually invent perceptions and relations to reality. And 20th century art, be it painting or photography definitely benefits from this. The lesser personal photographic projects with which most painters in this century have been involved as amateurs are certainly grounds for the acceptance and acculturation of the flaws and innovations alike of the automaticity and banalization of the production of pictures and imagery.

Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

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