Incomparables
A review of
Nouvelles
impressions de Raymond Roussel
(New
Impressions of Raymond Roussel)
Place: Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue
du Prˇsident Wilson, 75 116 Paris
Level
1 - Galerie Seine
Dates: 27/02/2013 - 20/05/2013
published 3/11/2013
@
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/incomparables/
Marcel
Duchamp by Man Ray (1920) & Etoile cosmique (1923) by
Raymond Roussel
Ē My
soul is a strange factory Č
-Raymond
Roussel
New Impressions of Raymond Roussel points us towards an intellectual
history that maps out artÕs role in creating a social allegory for the poetic
psychoanalysis[1] of
mechanized pleasure - in circular struggle with the mechanized mass killings of
World War I and II, the holocaust, and Hiroshima. And the rewards of such
exhausting circularity are considerable, given both the historical significance
of Raymond RousselÕs influence and its unapologetic relevance to todayÕs cyber
culture - with its intransigent obliqueness and mechanical dizziness.
But if I were going to generate an art
exhibition as homage to a particularly flamboyant artist,[2]
even if un peu obscur,
I would think that it would be advantageous to try to match the aesthetic
qualities of that person (absurdly intricate mechanical interlacings) with the
showÕs general aesthetic. Unfortunately, that was not the least bit achieved
with the homage to the wildly creative dandy writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933)[3]
that is at the Palais de Tokyo centre d'art contemporain in Paris.
While access to much of the remarkable
work here (including five of RousselÕs otherworldy hand written manuscript
pages for his last book Comment j'ai ˇcrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of my Books) and a
wonderful cookie-encasing sculpture memento called Etoile cosmique (Cosmic Star) - a glass and silver case
that Roussel had made for a star-shaped biscuit he brought back from lunch in
Juvisy-sur-Orge with the astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) on July 29,
1923) is to be appreciated and relished, the cavernous half-finished Level 1
Galerie Seine devoured
and neutralized any stylistic moods of gamesmanship that are associated with
Roussel: such as the famously extravagant, yet intricately hermetic, elaborate
mechanamorphic constructions that verged on the exuberantly preposterousness of
a machine running infinitely wild.
Perhaps if I had seen the other two
manifestations of this show - Impressions of Raymond Roussel held at the Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid)
in 2011 and the Museu Serralves (Porto) in 2012 - I may not have felt so
disappointed in the general lack of neurotic deliriousness experienced in this
one.
Granted that Raymond RousselÕs disregard
for financial restraint[4]
cannot be matched by the Palais de Tokyo, but still the gutted construction
materials hanging overhead in this ugly cavernous space takes the eye and mind
out of the magnificently intricate labyrinthine quality typical of his
extravagant writings: as established in the prose work Impressions dÕAfrique (1910) (a work that features a painting
machine that duplicates the color spectrum of the sky at dawn),[5]
Locus Solus (1914)
(like Impressions dÕAfrique, written according to formal constraints based on homonymic puns) and the obsessive but convulsingly
poetic Nouvelle Impressions dÕAfrique (1932).[6]
Thus the larger the art (even as it was needed to fill this mammoth half-raw
space) the worse it connected to RousselÕs sense of virtual impenetrability
through mechanical precision.
Mike Kelly, Kandors
10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude) (2011)
Mike Kelly, Kandors
10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude) (2011)
Rodney Graham, Camera
Obscura Mobile (1995-1996)
Mike KellyÕs
lumbering black cave Kandors 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude) (2011) and
Rodney GrahamÕs Camera Obscura Mobile (1995-1996) installation were
particularly unmatched to RousselÕs obsessive minute attention; a concentration
that is capable of whirling together copious narratives from a veiled network
of murky puns and obscured double entendres in a way that anticipates Oulipian.
Mark MandersÕs steamy black connectivist sculpture Mind Study (2011),
Giuseppe GabelloneÕs beautiful silver sculpture LÕAssetalo (Thirsty
Man) (2008) and Jacques CarelmanÕs droll motion sculpture Le Diamont (The
Dimond) (1975) worked only a bit better in reinforcing a spirit of intricate
mechanicalness as they each ate up almost an entire room. A relatively
fascinating installation by Andrˇ Maranha, Pedro Morais, Jorge Queiroz and
Francisco Tropa called Tres Moscas (Three Flies) (2012) did eat an
entire room and only delivered limited thematic power in terms of absurd
interlacing.
Andrˇ
Maranha, Pedro Morais, Jorge Queiroz and Francisco Tropa, Tres Moscas (Three
Flies) (2012)
Giuseppe
Gabellone, LÕAssetalo, (Thirsty Man) (2008)
Mark
Manders, Mind Study (2011)
Mark
Manders, Mind Study & Jean Tinguely, Requiem pour une
feuille morte (Requiem for a Dead Leaf) (1966-67) (on the wall)
Much more
capable of such finicky and arcane mesmerizing rhythms was the more intimate
yet preposterous work of Thomas Bayrle (his deadpan pulsating romantic machine Spatz
von Paris (2011) is one of the highlights of the show). Rodney GrahamÕs
series of books called The System worked well in the context and it
was captivating to see displays of the literary journal Revue Locus Solus,
established by American writers John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Kenneth Koch and
James Shuyler. Published in Paris between 1961 and 1962, the journal formed a
bridge between French authors, both historical and contemporary, and writers
from the New York School and the Beat Generation. The
Coll¸ge de Pataphysique was represented by the writer Jean Ferry who published
several studies devoted to Roussel, including LÕAfrique des Impressions, a detailed
analysis which consists of considering the text as instructions for users and
reconstructing, in the form of maps, diagrams and schedules, the journeys and
events that took place at Ponukˇlˇ, an imaginary place in RousselÕs Africa. Two
comical cosmic Joseph Cornell boxes, Blue Sand Box and Sand
Fountain from the early 1950s pleased me, as they bracketed a stream of
photographed drawings of fantastic imaginary architecture from 1857 by
Victorien Sardou - as did an early Pataphysical video by Jean-Christophe
Averty.
The
irascible Salvador Dal’ is represented with his short motion picture Impressions
de la Haute Mongolie (1975), made with the filmmaker Josˇ Montes-Baquer. Dal’ read
RousselÕs books as early as the 1920s and Roussel had a great influence on
Dal’Õs Ņcritical paranoiaÓ method. Dal’, who died with a copy of Impressions
d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest
writers ever. Jean Tinguely is inserted, rightly, into this mix with a
brain-teasing manic lithograph from 1966-67 called Requiem pour une feuille
morte (Requiem for a Dead Leaf), rather than an expected endless
drawing machine contraption, that would have more directly interlocked with
RousselÕs imagined painting machine.
And
RousselÕs major inspiration (along with novelist and naval officer Pierre
Loti), the author Jules Verne, has a wacky lithograph of a flat globe studded
with images entitled Around the World in Eighty Days from 1880.
Roussel greatly admired the works of Verne - which he read over and over again,
fascinated with their extraodinary voyages and machines, full of bachelor
scientists completely absorbed in positivist exploratory dreams taken to
delirious extremes. At that scale of interlacing, some of the hypnotic effect
of RousselÕs capacious playful circularity is possible to feel.
However, Gabriele Di MatteoÕs
contribution to the showÕs circularity is essential. His hand-painted over
digital-painting Marcel Duchamp, a life in pictures by Andrˇ Raffray illustrates
the time when Duchamp attended a showing of Impressions dÕAfrique in 1912, an
experience Duchamp would describe as revelatory. As Gabriele Di Matteo
depicts, Duchamp, along with Guillaume Appollinaire, Picabia and PicabiaÕs wife
Gabrielle Buffet, attended a performance of Impressions of Africa: the play
by Roussel based on his book. Duchamp later credited Roussel with the
inspiration for his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The
Large Glass). There are several original notes by Duchamp and a drawing that he
made for The Large Glass in 1912-1915 in the show, as well as
quite a few photos of Duchamp with The Large Glass. Among them
is the striking photo of Duchamp that was taken by Man Ray in 1920 that shows a
star carved out in DuchampÕs hair. This work connects ludicrously well with
RousselÕs star shaped cookie piece, Etoile cosmique, from just
three years later.
Man Ray,
photo of Marcel Duchamp (1920) La Tonsure
Raymond
Roussel, Etoile cosmique (1923)
Collection
littˇraire Pierre Leroy
Historically,
the mechanamorphic impulse behind Marcel Duchamp's works from 1912 (that
derived a good deal from Roussel) is of great significance. That is when
Duchamp started producing paintings and drawings depicting mechanized sex acts
such as Mechanics of Modesty and The Passage from the Virgin
to the Bride - and the fantastic machine-body work The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even that follow his exposure to the play Impressions
dÕAfrique - is an inescapable point of reference for the avant-garde of the
20th century. The same may be said for Francis Picabia (who has a room of
paintings all to himself at the show La Collection Michael Werner just a
stone throw away at the Musˇe d'Art Moderne Ville de Paris).
The elaborateness of the machine, for
Duchamp and Picabia, became the symbol of sexual bliss[7]
attainable through concept connected to auto-sexual autonomy in contradiction
to the horror that mechanized war had brought. By hypnotizing attention, the
machine freed them from troubling obsessions and personal hang-ups through the
alternative model of android life; intimating both our rush of desperation and
our ecstatic release, refracted through a web of glazed impersonality. If the
machine, as a representative of order, was a fascination Duchamp and Picabia
used to balance out the ageÕs clumsiness, whether of the mind or flesh,
RousselÕs mechanamorphic production and machine forms refigured the human body
into an almost mechanized substance.
In The Bride Stripped Bare by the
Bachelors, Even, which
positions a central bride machine over a bachelor apparatus, Duchamp, with the
strictness of machinery, applies fantasy to seduction and masturbation. In a
way, Duchamp suggests that we (as viewers) can use his art as a vehicle for
self-transcendence into a kind of dream world of nonsense sex. This rabbit-hole
logic he took from Roussel.
So New
Impressions of Raymond Roussel succeeds when it outlines an
eccentric expanding circular history of 20th-century art, linking the points
between artists and writers who have talked of the influence of this author and
his writings on their work: starting with Dada (Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia),
then Andrˇ Breton and the Surrealists (like Michel Leiris, Salvador Dal’, Jean
Cocteau) to Neo-Dada Nouveau rˇalisme (Jean Tinguely) through Oulipo (Georges
Perec) Pataphysicians (Jean Ferry, Jean-Christophe Averty and the Coll¸ge de
Pataphysique) and the authors of the nouveau roman (like Alain Robbe-Grillet).
As noted above, his most direct influence in the English-speaking world was
on the New York School of poets John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.
Writing as
art Š or - art as writing: this is the theoretical ripe fruit plucked from Nouvelles
impressions de Raymond Roussel - art theory as art - made
conceivable by RousselÕs inventions of language machines that produced texts
through the use of repetitions and combination/permutations. This machine-like
logic provides art with a seemingly pure spectacle of endless variety of
textual games and combinations flowing in circular form. (We see and feel this
most fully, however, in the sprawling and dazzling Julio Le Parc kinetic op art
retrospective on the first floor of the Palais de Tokyo, rather than in this
show.)
And there
are lessons here for painting, also. Within this writing process Roussel
described a number of fantastic machines, including a painting machine in his
novel Impressions of Africa. This painting machine wonderfully
describes and foresees the arrival of computer-robotic technology and it's
application to visual art which we have available to us today, a century after
he envisioned it.
The web also
regenerates deep connections to the past; so cyberspace, this territory which
stretches out from hypertext to the world-wide computer network, from virtual
reality to video games, might also be theorized as the domain of RousselÕs idea
of reduplicating without duplication, reiterating without repeating: his game-of-mirrors
cosmos. His is a strident activity lost in an infinite navigation from one sort
of encounter to another in which the affirmation of the other keeps appearing
and disappearing in the play of mechanical maneuvers (or mechanisms) destined
to avert gratification. This is where the bachelor apparatus of Duchamp repeats
itself ad infinitum by transmitting the machine via an alter-ego.
But too, New
Impressions of Raymond Roussel reminds us that Raymond Roussel's
themes and procedures also involved imprisonment and liberation, exoticism,
cryptograms and torture by language - all formally reflected in his working
technique with its inextricable play of double images, repetitions, and
impediments, all giving the impression of the pen running on by itself through
the dreamy usage and baroque play of mirrored form.
Roussel's
running on repetition technique, as used in the Thomas Bayrle sculpture, for
example, lends itself well to the creation of unforeseen, automatic and
spontaneously art which gives me the feeling of prolonging action into eternity
through the ceaseless, fantastic constructions of the work itself, transmitting
an altered, exalted and orgasmic state of mind which after the initial dazzling
creates one predominant overall effect: that of creating doubt through
mechanical discourse.
The image of
enclosure is common with Roussel where a secret to a secret is held back,
systematically imposing a formless anxiety in the reader through the
labyrinthine extensions and doublings, disguises and duplications of his texts,
which make all speech and vision undergo a moment of annihilation.
New
Impressions of Raymond Roussel succeeds when it presents to us
through intimacy the model of quiet perfection of the eternally repetitive
mechanical machine which functions independently of time and space, pulling us
into a logic of the infinite. We can learn this from Roussel's final rebus-like
book, Comment j'ai ˇcrit certains de mes livres (How I
Wrote Certain of my Books); the last of his conceptual machines, the machine
which contains and repeats within its mechanism all those mental machines he
had formerly described and put into motion, making evident the machine which
produced all of his machines - the master machine.[8]
All of these machines map out an eccentric spiral space that is circular in
nature and thus an abstract attempt at eliminating time. They reproduce the old
myths of departure, of loss and of return. They construct a crisscrossed
mechanical map of the two great mythic spaces so often explored by western
imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden, containing the quest, the
return and the treasure (for example the geography of the Argonauts and the
labyrinth) - and the other space of polymorphosis noise: the visible
transformation of instantly crossed frontiers and borders, of strange
affiliations, of spells, and of symbolic replacements (the space of the
Minotaur).
Nouvelles
impressions de Raymond Roussel potentially removes us out of our
quiet and glib indolence and points us in the potent direction of expanding
intensity. I believe that shows like Nouvelles impressions de Raymond
Roussel are critical to us now because the counter-mannerist excess found
there can problematize the popular simulacra that art has become - and make
livelier the underground intricately strange privateness of the human animal.
***
Joseph Nechvatal
***
Nouvelles
impressions de Raymond Roussel (New Impressions of Raymond Roussel) has
work in it by: Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Jean-Michel Alberola, Jean-Christophe
Averty, Zbynek Baladr‡n, Thomas Bayrle, Jacques
Carelman, Guy de Cointet, Coll¸ge de Pataphysique, Joseph
Cornell, Salvador Dal’, Gabriele Di Matteo, Thea Djordjadze, Marcel
Duchamp, Giuseppe Gabellone, Rodney Graham, Jo‹o Maria Gusm‹o
& Pedro Paiva, Mike Kelley, Revue Locus Solus, Pierre
Loti, Sabine Macher, Man Ray, Mark Manders, Andrˇ Maranha,
Pedro Morais, Jorge Queiroz et Francisco Tropa, Jean-Michel
Othoniel, Victorien Sardou, Joe Scanlan, Jean
Tinguely, Jules Verne.
Raymond
Roussel, Etoile cosmique (1923)