Visions of the Real within Nouveau Réalisme

Transcription

OwnReality 2013 (3)
Antje Kramer
Visions of the Real within Nouveau Réalisme
<1>
The archives of critic Pierre Restany include a typed supplement to the "Realism" article in the 10volume Grand Larousse encyclopédique:
"Fine arts. Nouveau Réalisme, artistic movement that existed in organised form in the years 1960 to 1963 under the aegis of French critic Pierre Restany. […] Reacting against a certain sclerosis of abstract art in the 1950s, this new realism, which grew out of but also went beyond Dadaist positions, sought to embrace all sociological reality and manifested itself in the consciousness of the urban and technological 'nature' of a whole modern 'folklore,' initially captured by a process of constat [factual recording], and then ordered for expressive purposes."1
If we adhere to this definition conceived for publication in an encyclopaedia, and therefore meant to be universal, the history of Nouveau Réalisme is easy to get a purchase on: it consists of thirteen artists united by a critique of art based around the notion of "appropriating the real," a notion that is itself founded by the desire, as Restany writes, to "embrace all sociological reality," and then of a constitutive declaration made at Yves Klein's home on 27 October 1960, three manifestos and three group shows, and finally its proclaimed dissolution in February 1963. This is the history that has been perpetuated over nearly fifty years in galleries and museums and in books on the subject. And yet, this unambiguous genealogy of a kind of art characteristic of consumer society, constantly augmented and repeated by the conscientious historiographer Restany, falls apart as soon as we take a closer look at the individual discourses of the artists in the group.
1/ Pierre Restany around 1960, photographer unknown, Rennes, Archives de la critique d’art, Fonds Pierre Restany
<2>
While Restany developed a terminology which he considered specific to the Nouveaux Réalistes, around notions such as "real," "reality" and "realism," these terms were in fact a long way from, or even in opposition Pierre Restany, "Extrait du supplément au Grand Larousse encyclopédique en 10 volumes," typed manuscript kept at the Archives de la Critique d'Art, Châteaugiron, Fonds Restany.
1
Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der CreativeCommonsLizenz NamensnennungKeine kommerzielle NutzungKeine Bearbeitung (CCBYNCND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/byncnd/3.0/de
to the ambitions of its representatives. This disparity can be observed in Klein, who was certainly more idealist than realist in his quest for immaterial sensibility, as well as in the work of other figures such as Arman, Christo, Tinguely and Niki de SaintPhalle, whose works are freighted with a violence and a social critique that are as ambiguous as they are undeniable, and that have been thoroughly analysed by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac in his authoritative study L'ordre sauvage. Violence, dépense et sacré dans l'art des années 19501960, published in 2004. This art was thus constantly in opposition to its dominant interpretation, founded on optimism and the folklore of modernity. However, if Restany purged these works of their contestatory dimension, the positions of the artists themselves, in spite of their critical and violent ambiguity, were not unequivocal. In this essay I will examine the way in which the proponents of Nouveau Réalisme used the notions of "real" and "reality" in order to reappraise Restany's interpretation from within the group and to circumvent the dominant reading which has too often confined the movement to the narrow field of its grammar of objects. That is why, even at the risk of causing a degree of frustration, I will be less concerned here with the real as it applies to objects than with the semantic peripeteia of the term in the different discursive strategies that confronted one another in this group of artists.
"… feet back on the ground"
<3>
During the short existence of the Nouveau Réalistes group, Restany wrote three manifestos which seem to nest together in telescopic fashion. Although he noted from the outset in his first text, in April 1960, a certain continuity "forty degrees above Dada,"2 he also lyrically proclaimed "the thrilling adventure of the real" reflecting an emerging world, pursued in opposition to the "wise academicians or honest people scared by the acceleration of art history" who "try to stop the sun or suspend time's flight by running counter to the hands on a watch."3
<4>
Being in time, never turning back, the better to grasp the future, or even transform it: such were the ambitions articulated within this group of artists. In his historical comparison, Restany reduces one of the most radical phenomena of the avantgarde, Dada, to the "myth" which, according to him, boils down to the contestatory nature of the "comprehensive no" that was its stance. 4 It was precisely this degree zero that the new generation was responding to, as he wrote, "without any aggressivity complex, without any particular controversial desire, looking to nothing but to our realism for justification." 5
Pierre Restany, "Le nouveau réalisme, avril 1960, Milan (premier manifeste)," in P. Restany, Le Nouveau Réalisme [1978], Paris, LunaPark Transédition, 2007, p. 172. Translation in Kristine Stiles, Peter Selz (eds.), Theories and Documents of Modern Art, University of California Press, 1996, p. 306.
2
3
Ibid, p. 306.
4
Translated from P. Restany, Le Nouveau Réalisme [1978], Paris Ibid., p. 172.
5
Ibid.
<5>
Clearly then, as viewed by Restany, Nouveau Réalisme was defined in relation to its originality, faithful to the principle of the alliance against the dominant tendency, i.e., the safe abstraction of the School of Paris, and by the invocation of a historical president, by summoning up the distant – because "without any aggressivity complex" – heritage of Dadaism. These manifestos are underpinned by an absolute confidence in art. On their assessment, this second avantgarde will be able to accomplish the desires and fantasies of the preceding one, because it has learnt the lesson: it is no longer seduced by the contestatory, iconoclastic spirit of the fathers. But what exactly is this "realism”? Like a "revised and corrected" version of the Dadaist revolt, Restany's idea of Nouveau Réalisme advocates a new moderation which, instead of seeking to break with existing society, attempts to "reintegrate" man into the real – in a word, to establish a consensual relation between art and society. In her study, "Towards an Art of Integration?", published in the proceedings of the symposium "Pierre Restany's HalfCentury," Jill Carrick has shown how, in the optimistic climate of the "new" France embodied since January 1959 by Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic, Restany, a former speechwriter for various government ministries, advocated an art in which social critique was replaced by positive integration. He puts forward a similar point of view in his 1967 article "Vers une nouvelle justification sociale de l'art," not without a degree of provocation in the turbulent context of pre1968 France.
"Avantgarde art today is an art that integrates the real, an art of participation and not evasion or revolt. The social critique approach is nonexistent, or at the very most 'supplementary'." 6
<6>
If Restany thus exposed Nouveau Réalisme to a generally negative response that saw the "thrilling adventure of the real" as going hand in hand with "the pure and simple celebration of the capitalist status quo,"7 he also gave an implicit definition of what he meant by "realism": an art placed deliberately in the service of the powers that be in contemporary society. Moreover, in a later article, dating from July 1977, "Problèmes du réalisme aujourd'hui,"8 Restany was even more explicit, if not unabashed, in his explanations. His analysis surveys the art scene since 1945, generally describing it as "realist" and including Nouveau Réalisme, in seven points. The fourth one is particularly edifying. Under the heading, "Realism and the Metaphor of Power," Restany argues that "the central motivation of all contemporary realisms is precisely 'voluntary servitude' […]. The realist artist deliberately produces his own submission to power. His art is the illustrative seal on this fatalistic pact."9 A position which he explains as follows:
<7>
"Fatalism, rather than resignation, does not exclude the cry of revolt of narrative figuration […]. The revolt is 6
Pierre Restany, "Vers une nouvelle justification sociale de l'art," Progrès, no. 11, September 1967, p. 57.
7
Jill Carrick, op. cit., p. 77.
Pierre Restany, "Problèmes du réalisme aujourd'hui," July 1977, in P. Restany, Le Nouveau Réalisme, op. cit., p. 139
145.
8
9
Ibid., p. 141.
ambivalent, consciously nostalgic for another power, a critical hysteria that is none other than the exalted expression of the desire for submission to another form of servitude, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The mechanically sustained illusion of a better world is embodied in the abundantly present theme of a brighter tomorrow."10
<8>
If the critic here offers a lucid and disenchanted analysis of the conditions that realist art cannot escape, that is to say, its referent: power, in the process he also formulates a riposte to one of his most direct competitors and opponents, Gérard GassiotTalabot. A few months earlier, this theoretician and leading advocate of Narration Figurative published an essay in the catalogue of Mythologies quotidiennes 2, an exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in which he attacked "tautology and its nearest, ugliest neighbour: "'the constat'"11 (the plain recording of reality). In his entry for the Grand Larousse, as we may recall, Restany once again invoked the "procédure de constat" as a necessary phase in the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes. Earlier articles by GassiotTalabot had already dismissed Nouveau Réalisme as visual tautology and capitalist mythmaking. Writing for Opus international in 1973 he had affirmed:
"The first time that such a fragment of the real was gathered, trapped, accumulated or compressed in order – it being only what it was – to attest the context from which it was removed […] free access was given to a tautological definition of reality."12
<9>
Since this fragment of the real is "only what it is," like a metonym of the real world, simply observing a reality, thereby going with the flow of an artistic inventory that merely repeats the reality from which it was chosen. Whereas criticism of Figuration Narrative presented his way of functioning in reproachful terms, manifestly disappointed at the works' lack of critical engagement, it simply reiterated Restany's interpretation, which, as of the first manifestos, argued that, through "the artistic baptism of the ordinary object," the 'Nouveaux Réalistes' were "getting our feet back on the ground." 13 We should therefore note that this opposition between the two critics is a refraction in the art milieu of a much wider conflict: the political conflict between Left and Right. If art based on an appropriation of the real was to be credited with critical interest by representatives of the Left, including not only GassiotTalabot but also the Situationist International, it must first of all, and in principle, serve counterpower – it must, in other words, acquire a semiotic level superior to tautology, to "being only what it is." The "voluntary servitude" 14 of the act of appropriation, diagnosed by 10
Ibid., p. 141142.
Gérald GassiotTalabot, "Le double sens des mythologies quotidiennes," in Mythologies quotidiennes 2, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, AprilJune 1977, n.p.
11
12
Gérald GassiotTalabot, "Réalisme et tautologie," Opus international, nos. 4445, June 1973, p. 18.
13
Pierre Restany, "Problèmes du réalisme aujourd'hui," July 1977, in Le Nouveau Réalisme, op. cit., p 143.
14
Ibid., p. 142.
Restany, with its common references to "modern, commercial, industrial and urban nature," 15 ultimately does not constitute any more than an art that is precisely very appropriate to the dominant powers of the time of its creation.
The appropriation of the real: a hobbled warhorse
<10>
Among the artists of the Nouveau Réaliste movement, Arman was no doubt the one who most comprehensively demonstrated the artist's position in relation to this opposition within the critical field, as raised by his own work. With his "feet on the ground, as Restany suggested, Arman concluded that "the theory of appropriation was false. But we needed it in order to make our entrance onto the art scene." 16 Further, faced with the horizon of leftwing art critical expectations, he emphasised:
"In 1960, you could pass off anything with the label 'art of derision.' Comics, Duchamp's bottle racks, my dustbins, everything became an 'art of derision.' Someone who presented helicopter blades grated like gruyere would have won critical esteem if he had claimed to be pointing the finger at the helicopters that bombarded Vietnam. Advertising became acceptable if you claimed to be attacking it." 17
<11>
If it is therefore necessary to select and multiple objects from the real in order to endow them with a clear message of social or political protest, the artist himself prefers to maintain the ambiguity of his accumulated objects:
"It is obvious that there is an element of social commentary in my work that I cannot dispense with, and this implicates a whole part of my work as an artist. But whether I allude to and critique social fetishes, or exalt consumerism the better to comprehend it, I have myself been an inveterate windowshopper and fanatical collector. There's always a bit of a mixture of contradictions, whether you like it or not." 18
<12>
The appropriation of the object does effectively oscillate between the extreme poles of an exaltation and a political, economic and social critique of contemporary society. Characteristic, no doubt, of any kind of realism19 – I am thinking, for one thing, of the antithetical rhetoric used to describe realist works, such as "the beauty of poverty" ensured by moral sincerity, etc. – this intrinsic contradiction acquires an autonomous 15
Ibid.
16
Arman, Mémoires accumulés. Entretiens avec Otto Hahn, Paris: Belfond, 1992, p. 37.
17
Ibid., p. 130.
Arman quoted by Tita Reut, "Engagé, pas militant. Entretien avec Arman" in Thomas CompèreMorel (ed.), Arman armé, Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, Milan, 5 Continents Éditions, 2004, p. 21.
18
The first thing that comes to mind, of course, are the huge gaps between the intentions of artists like Daumier and Courbet and the glorification of the proletariat advocated by socialist realism. Similarly critics may judge a given artist's work in anithetical terms, such as the "beauty of poverty," in which moral sincerity is the source of beauty. One could mention others.
19
status in both the production and reception of Nouveau Réalisme. However, without imposing any single mode of interpretation, the profusion of objects or "drunkenness of the real," to quote the title of the exhibition catalogue published by the Carré d'Art de Nîmes in 1993 (L'Ivresse du réel), was constantly juggling with binary oppositions between exaltation and contestation, vitalism and morbidity, utopia and angst. But these works never corresponded to the onedirectional pragmatic optimism advocated by Restany, for whom "Marcel Duchamp's antiart gesture takes on a positivity" 20 corresponding to a situation assessment of "modern folklore."
<13>
This deep ambiguity, which is inherent in the reuse and assemblage of objects, and is found in the work of all the Nouveaux Réalistes – the only possible exception being Martial Raysse, the only one who truly followed the logic of Pop Art – is expressed most eloquently by Jean Tinguely. On the occasion of his solo show in Düsseldorf in spring 1959, he printed a short text by way of a manifesto: "Für Statik"21 (In Favour of Statics). By calling for fulfilment in the moment, he glorified movement and sketched the model of a world in a state of perpetual becoming:
"Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of outofdate concepts of time. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. LIVE IN TIME. BE STATIC WITH MOVEMENT. For a static of the present moment. Resist the anxious fear to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living.
Stop insisting on "values" which can only break down. Stop evoking movements and gestures. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present; live once more in Time and by Time – for a wonderful and absolute reality." 22
<14>
In this Bergsonian vision of time, it would seem not that time has ceased to exist, but simply that it has ceased to be useful, whereas the present is to be interpreted not as what is, but as what is being done.
In spite of its emphatic, galvanising style, this text cannot hide the disturbing potential in which it is grounded. According to the artist, the one and only stable agent is the present moment or, in other words, simultaneity. All the rest – "values," traditions, "cathedrals": in a word, History – inevitably collapses "into dust." In those Cold War years, when the dawning trauma of the Holocaust and the nuclear shock was redoubled by international political and military crises, this effectiveness of an art founded on the instant and on instantaneousness – of a "beautiful and absolute reality," but also an ephemeral one – is also and above all Pierre Restany, "À quarante degrés audessus de dada," May 1961, in P. Restany, Le Nouveau Réalisme, op. cit., p. 173.
20
For an English translation, see Alex Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists' Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, Penguin, 2011.
21
Antje Kramer (ed.), Les grands manifestes de l'art des xixe et xxe siècles, Paris, BeauxArts Éditions, 2011, p. 190.
22
Ibid.
nourished by a Zeitgeist marked in this case by uncertainty and infused with a mood of threat. In the same way as Yves Klein fantasised about the eternal shadows of Hiroshima and proposed to paint the A and H bombs blue,23 Tinguely exclaimed even more explicitly in another text published in 1961:
"Decomposition does not exist! Decomposition is a state envisaged only by us because we do not want it to exist, and because we dread it!"24
<15>
This disturbing basis which condemns most of Tinguely's machines to perpetual motion, living only in the present moment, generates a deep division between the celebration of life and the cruelty of collapse and decomposition on the path to death, the ineluctable end, like a danse macabre. Because they were made using defective, worn and asymmetrical mechanical parts, they produce a squeaking, groaning friction that leads, sooner or later, to dysfunction. And it is precisely this malfunctioning of "sick machines," to borrow the metaphor coined by Maurice Fréchuret,25 which was celebrated in grandiose stagings of selfdestroying machines such as Tinguely's Homage to New York or Studies for an End of the World.26 Tinguely himself considered his apparatus as being like prisoners of a dualism between joy and despair. In an interview with Alain Jouffroy, for example, he said: "They are free, it is true. They are joyous, true, but they are also desperate. They are condemned in their confined space to make the same movement, always the same movement."27 Contrary to the euphoric visions of the Futurists and of Fernand Léger, or of the artist
engineers of the Bauhaus, the Swiss artist manifested a degree of critical and poetic distance with regard to technological progress.
<16>
If Restany was constantly trying to move the appropriation of the real as the group's common denominator towards an "appropriate" form of art deliberately obeisant with regard to the social status quo, the fact remains that the works resulting from their artistic approach and the discourses of their creators cannot be so easily integrated among the glorious developments of this "great republic of our social exchanges" invoked On this point, see Klein's letter to the president of the International Conféerence for the Detection of Atomic Explosives, May 1958, Archives Yves Klein, Paris. Reproduced in facsimile format in Camille Morineau (ed.), Yves Klein. Corps, couleur, immatériel Paris: Centre GeorgesPompidou, 2006, p. 269.
23
"Zersetzung existiert nicht ! Zersetzung ist ein von uns vorgestellter Zustand, weil wir nicht wollen, dass er existiere, und weil wir ihn fürchten!” Excerpt from Tinguely's text “Static, static, static !...," ZERO 3, 1961, reprinted in Heinz Mack/Otto Piene (eds.), Zero, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973 (facsimile edition of three issues of the review from 1958 to 1961), p. 119
24
25
Maurice Fréchuret, La Machine à peindre, Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1994, p. 148.
In 1961 he made his first Étude pour une fin du monde at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark. A year later he staged his second apocalyptic vision in the desert of Nevada. For the celebrations of the tenth birthday of Nouveau Réalisme in Milan, he erected a phallus eleven metres high on the Piazza del Duomo and then shattered it. Self
destruction is a leitmotif in Tinguely's work, and is manifest, too, in a number of smaller pieces.
26
"Jean Tinguely, "Iinterview de Jean Tinguely par Alain Jouffroy," L'œil, no. 136, April 1966, quoted after M. Fréchuret, op. cit., p. 147148.
27
by the critic.28 Appropriation as an action for absorbing "the whole of sociological reality" was a limping warhorse, the cause of much debate within the group. Further, this logic based on the reality of the object was clearly challenged by the work of Yves Klein.
<17>
In his monochrome paintings, in his emphasis on the void and in the body marks made by his "living brushes," Klein set out to proclaim the reign of the sensible through works that aimed at the immaterial. How can his work, which aimed to be absolute and clearly freighted with "recipes for happiness," those very recipes that the critic had rejected, how can this body of work be linked to Restany's logic of sociological factuality? How could this artist who claimed to master the laws of levitation be merged into a collective identity based on the need to get "our feet back on the ground"? Time and time again, critics have stumbled on Klein's role within Restany's concept of Nouveau Réalisme, questioning the link between his work and the principle of appropriation found in the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes. These criticisms were in fact aired during the group's active period, when they were formulated by Arman and Hains. 29 In an interview made for the catalogue of the first major retrospective put on at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1986, 1960. Les Nouveaux Réalistes, Restany addressed this contradiction thus:
"Nouveau Réalisme is a vision of the world in which the object plays a central role. […] But one can also consider that pure pigment is also an object. The immaterial is a superobject, it is energy. Klein enabled the Nouveaux Réalistes to live their life on the level of the relational accusative, of the part taken for the whole. The whole was Klein, and each one had parts." 30
<18>
By sleight of hand – but the trick was fading – critics thus change vocabulary, adapting as best they can to the metonymic principle of the real object recuperated from the relational and amicable functioning of the group, in which Klein did in fact occupy a leading position. As Richard Leeman very appositely pointed out in his article for the catalogue of the Grand Palais exhibition, Le Nouveau Réalisme (2007), "when it came to relating Klein to his theory, Restany left the terrain of rationalism – signalled by the allusive and relatively imprecise references to the terminological apparatus of the human sciences (sociology), or even structuralism (significance, structure, morphology, syntax), to enter into the esoteric and irrationalist register (energy, etc.), with no attempt at transition." 31
Aware of this shaky compromise around an inadequate, or even erroneous collective identity, Klein riposted Pierre Restany, "À quarante degrés audessus de dada," mai 1961, dans P. Restany, Le Nouveau Réalisme, op. cit., p. 173.
28
29
See on this point in particular, Arman, op. cit., p. 37.
“La prise en compte réaliste d'une situation nouvelle. Un entretien avec Pierre Restany,” in Bernadette Contensou (ed.), 1960. Les Nouveaux Réalistes, Paris: Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1986, p. 21.
30
Richard Leeman, "Médiatisation, théorisation, historisation : une 'restanysation,'" in Cécile Debray (ed.), Le Nouveau Réalisme, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris: RMN, 2007, p. 259.
31
constantly with communiqués and various actions. We know how violently he reacted to Restany's comparison with the Dadaist heritage, which led to a first split in the group as early as October 1961. But above all, Klein had no hesitation about hogging the credit when it came to originality, even maintaining that he was the true inventor of Nouveau Réalisme. In a note kept at the Klein Archives titled "Reality exceeds fiction, realism exceeds the object," he puts forward his idea of "current realism":
"When I agreed to share the responsibilities of Nouveau Réalisme with Restany, it was because the confusion was already there. As long as I was the promoter and founder, it was not about the adventure of the object. The object… The object, what has the object got to do with this adventure of Nouveau Réalisme, which in fact isn't a realism. […] The NRs want to achieve the experience of openness, of the impregnation of sensibility within sensibility. One thing they are definitely not trying to do is provoke, to shock the bourgeoisie."
<19>
According to Klein, who thereby took his fellow group members hostage, "Yves Klein's current realism" was, "the only attitude in today's art that truly constitutes a new point of view, a new, positive and constructive integration into the real."32 Klein, as a true champion of appropriation, managed to place Nouveau Réalisme among his own cosmogonies. Indeed, whereas his work was far from matching the visual and ideological principles of Restany's "sociological real," Klein demonstrated his spectacular talent for appropriation. That is why, when leaving the purely aesthetic viewpoint for a more global vision of the artist and his effectiveness, Restany responded as follows to Arman at a symposium in 1999:
"Indeed, I think that if there is in effect an 'appropriator' of reality, it is him [Klein]. […] As far as appropriation goes, if we need to single out Yves Klein, that may be because he well and truly 'appropriated' us." 33
<20>
The fact remains that the logic of appropriating the real implicitly allows the conditions, the degrees of identification and internal weaknesses involved in applying the collective ideal of Nouveau Réalisme to show through. An ideal with regard to which neither the "celebration of social reality" nor the metonymic logic of the real object allowed for unanimity, and which ultimately had to be borne, as Arman put it, like a "placard that Restany stuck on our back."34
Finally, in order to make more explicit the great gap between Restany's interpretation and the actual production of Nouveau Réalisme, I would like to mention one of the famous events in the chronology of this Parisian group in light of its decontextualization in critical discourse. Evidencing a real diversion of meaning, this example – but I could have mentioned others – very precisely shows the gap that opened between the reality of the work and its rhetorical promotion.
32
Ibid., p. 409.
Michel Baudson (Ed.), Le Nouveau Réalisme, proceedings of the symposium organised at the initiative of Daniel Abadie, Paris: Éditions du Jeu de Paume, 1999, p. 88.
33
34
Arman, op. cit., p. 46.
"Drumming it in"
<21>
On the evening of 27 June 1962, Christo, a Bulgarian artist aged twentysix, had two hundred and forty empty oil drums delivered to the narrow Rue Visconti in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. Under the authority of Galerie J, the public was invited to attend the erection of a "temporary monument" in the form of an "assemblage wall," as the invitation put it. This wall of barrels was 4.3 metres high and 3.8 metres wide, displaying a variety of colours and inscriptions. Its monumental, horizontal form filled the whole width of the street, making it impossible to pass and cutting off the traffic flow between Rue de Seine and Rue Bonaparte. The sheer size of the installation obstructed the view over to the other side and the empty petrol barrels blocked the traffic. During this action, such was the agitation that the angry residents of the buildings poured buckets of water on the masons who were helping the artist, watched by the assembled guests in evening wear, while the police wanted to bring the participants to book, notwithstanding the fact that the prefecture had granted permission.35 A few hours later, the assemblage was taken down and packed away, and the only record of this unusual summer evening is a photographic one.
The title of this ephemeral installation, Rideau de fer (Iron Curtain) was freighted with meaning. According to typed documents by the artist,36 the idea for the project went back to October 1961. It was meant as an explicit reaction to the construction of the Berlin Wall two months earlier, which materialised what Churchill had observed in March 1946: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."37 The work deployed an undeniably political symbolism that went beyond its evocative title. By starting with the image of a unified barricade, the rigorous alignment of empty drums also brought to mind military formations, the coordination of human masses standing to attention, but also images of death, with the empty, battered drums evoking piledup corpses. By its dimensions, the installation put viewers in a vulnerable, powerless position with regard to a height that seemed impossible to pass. Christo's "Iron Curtain" was a metre higher than the Berlin one.
The artist first built a wall of barrels for a solo show in Cologne, in 1961, when they stood in the back room of the gallery. The impression, as described by a German art critic, is no doubt comparable to the one given by the Rideau de fer in Rue Visconti:
"Passing through the door, our steps became hesitant: a hermetic wall formed an offensive front of silence, made from piled up barrels, the bottoms of which go from brown and red to white or grey. Here and there occasional openings gaped in the darkness. Optically aggressive, the juxtaposed round forms seemed to be thrusting forward, as if they wanted to explode the dimensions of the room which, otherwise, was completely empty."38
Anecdoted related by Thomas Kellein, SputnikSchock und Mondlandung. Künstlerische Großprojekte von Yves Klein zu Christo, Stuttgart: Hatje, 1989, p. 111.
35
36
Held in the Hanns Sohm collection, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
37
Winston Churchill, "Fulton speech," 5 March 1946.
Siegfried Bonk, "Abgenütztes verhüllt sein zweites Gesicht. Ausstellung Christo in der Galerie Lauhus" Kölner Stadt
Anzeiger, 31 July 1961.
38
2/ Front side of the invitation card for Christo’s Rideau de fer, Paris, June 1962, Galerie J, Rennes, Archives de la critique d'art, Fonds Pierre Restany, dossier Christo ART077
3/ Reverse side of the invitation for Christo’s Rideau de fer, Paris, June 1962, Galerie J, Rennes, Archives de la critique d'art, Fonds Pierre Restany, dossier Christo ART077.
<22>
The aggressiveness felt by the critic, caused by the monumentality of the row of basic, battered and rusty objects, coincided with Christo's intentions insofar as, in a typed text dating from 1961, the artist stated that "this free aggressiveness, this possibility of multiplying oneself, occupying space with their volume, of advancing and pushing back the public, is something I want the people looking at them to feel." 39
However, on the evening of 27 June 1962 it was not the idea of a monument to the violence of the dominant political power that seemed to strike the public, nor that of a barricade recalling Paris under the Commune. In the preface by Restany, who thus brought his critical sanction to this event, the contestatory power of the work is reduced to "the poetry of the real,” to a "transcendental vision of the blind energy of work, commerce Christo, "Notes sur mes travaux," Paris, July 1961, typed document kept in the Hanns Sohm archives, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, reproduced in facsimile form in T. Kellein, op. cit., p. 106.
39
and human activity," and, no doubt even worse, a "triumphal arch of the moment". 40 Contrary to the literal meaning of the word "monument," this wall was not there to commemorate a historical event but, according to the critic, was more clearly inscribed in the utilitarian fluctuations and transformations of the city. Rhetorically kicking any kind of political implication into the long grass, Restany affirmed that the artist "quite naturally" spoke "the language of Nouveau Réalisme".41 Thus the installation's evocative name was due simply to its metal components. The impact of the wall of drums, the idea for which arose a year earlier in Germany in the immediacy of political tension, was, according to Restany, purely aesthetic. Recuperated by the chronology of Nouveau Réalisme, it became an "iron curtain of beauty."42 Christo himself did not comment on this discursive appropriation of these appropriated objects, but left a lingering ambiguity. After this experience, he stuck by the words he had noted in 1960: "I do not write. You write, and then I'll sign." 43
As this example shows, the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes fits ill into a simple reading of it as an art celebrating "the capitalist status quo." But Restany was constantly emptying it of its wider impact in order to hook it up as best he could with his theory of a "sociological backup to the essential phase of communication".44 And it was here, precisely, in the gap between the artists' intentions, the visual impact of the works themselves, and Restany's interpretation, that we find a real, deep fault line in the Nouveau Réaliste system. Confined in a onedimensional reading, cut off from social confrontation, it lost much of its power. It was not until 1977 that the critic's habitual discourse accommodated a short sentence that seems to propose, albeit modestly, an opening that may take into account the concurrent intentions and profound ambiguity that marked the Nouveau Réaliste machine: "The real is inseparable from the imaginary; the object, from fantasy."45
Translated from the French
by Charles PENWARDEN
Photo credits
All rights reserved : Plates 2 and 3
Rennes, Archives de la critique d’art, Fonds Pierre Restany : Plate 1
These excerpts come from the text by Restany's in the catalogue accompanying the event, published by Galerie J, reproduced among others in 1960. Les Nouveaux Réalistes, op. cit., p. 93.
40
41
Preface by Restany, reproduced ibid.
42
Ibid.
Christo in 1960, quoted in Thomas Kellein, Montage der Attraktionen. Christos Kölner Anfänge zu Großprojekten, Worms: Werner, 1986, p. 5.
43
Pierre Restany, "Les nouveaux réalistes, 16 April 1960, Milan first manifesto)," in P. Restany, Le Nouveau Réalisme, op. cit., p. 171.
44
45
Pierre Restany, "Problèmes du réalisme aujourd'hui," ibid., p. 139.

Visions of the Real within Nouveau Réalisme

Transcription

Similar documents

Windsor Catalogue.indd

Art Nouveau (1890

De Kat (English) - 2013-12

3 fun places to find that gotta-have toy

File - WORLD.ARTvisa

Robert Gene Klein was born on February 10, 1928`to Bert and Kate

Art wooden - Puzzle Michèle Wilson

Gaudi elevator discovered in Palermo Italy? | Art Nouveau