Le nombril de l'artiste

Reveillé par ma voisine à cinq heure de mat d'une sommeil très profonde. conversation très forte dans la cour. Bruits dans l'escalier, tappage avec des talons audessous de ma tête. Je sors sur le palier. "Mais...j'ai mon examen aujourd'hui....". Ce que je n'ai pas dit "si tu es aussi mal-organisée que tu ne peux pas penser à faire tout ça à une heure descente, tu risque de râter ton examen de toute manière...." "J'ai, moi, mon" : est-ce que personne ne pense plus aux autres?

A hanging party in Lagny!....

Well, there wer two guys in neckties, but nobody got hurt!

Seriously, last night was the opening of Clémentine P.'s very small exposition at Vélin in Lagny. Velin (run for several decades by Michelle Welinsky, who is a well-known local figure in her own right) is a clothing shop which has an active cultural season, exposing artists, organizing small concerts and other manifestations.

Only a handful of works were exposed and it was difficult to see any interconnection between the works chosen, other than the artist's usual preoccupations with urban architecture juxtaposed with surreal quotations from Pop culture. Miss Clémentine P. explained that she had several expositions in preparation, so she selected images from disparate sources which were not actually intended to be displayed together. Given the limited number of images displayed and this information, it is difficult to discuss the actual exposition, other than to point out an influence of Buffet and Soulages, which the artist acknowledged during our short conversation.

From "The Bed of Procrustes"

Robust is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who dislike it (artists)...

Nassim Nicolas Taleb

Art as ritual/Ritual as Art

In 1998, I participated in the project that composer Antoine Tisné considered to be the most direct expression of his musical thought : « Music for Sacred Spaces » organised by the EKT in Erfurt, Germany with Françoise Lévechin-Gangloff, organ. This project, based on a idea of Jean-Thierry Boisseau was a series of three concerts during three days at which the same program of works for Saxophone and Organ was programmed in three different churches (two Protestant Churches and one Catholic Church). The audience followed the performers and the composer in a candle-lit procession through the streets of Erfurt between the Churches

The series of 3 x 3 concerts were completed by a tenth « private » event : the « pilgrimage » to the concentration camp in Buchenwald outside of Weimar by the composer and the performers. Tisné considered this project to have a symbolic meaning outside of the actual concerts themselves and spoke of the event as being a « ritual cleansing for all of the events surrounding the Second World War and the Communist period ». The works involved in this project include « Psalmodies for Saxophone and Organ », « Alta Mira » for Organ, and the works « Monodie I, II et V pour un Espace Sacré ». The last work will be performed again in Saint Roch in Paris on February 12, 2012 with works by Brenet and Boisseau, among others.

The idea behind this concert was the notion of a hidden ritual, which Tisné explained to me had great symbolism for him This notion of art as ritual/ritual of art is a central part of my work as a composer and performer. This concept will be developed in the next few months.

Between the Ferme du Buisson and the galerie Continua...

I've been thinking more and more about Nassim Nicolas Taleb's ideas concerning "Anti-fragility" in terms of how this concept relates to artists and creation. Taleb considers artists to be extremely robust in the sense that they usually don't care about fashion, markets etc but rather follow their vision in the process of creation.

In thinking about this, I happened to notice that some members of this community decided to define this location as being :

...between the Ferme du Buisson and the galerie Continua...

...While this might be true, it seems to me that in defining this location in terms of an established state-funded cultural institution and a multi-national art gallery, that there might be quite a bit of implications in this definition. My question is : in these days of financial turmoil, doesn't defining location according to the established Art market sort of defeat the purpose of what could be a "black swan" heavy zone of "wild randomness"?

...Just a question, of course...

Burning Man, social dynamics and "Wild Randomness"

A couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about this year's "Burning Man" event, a "happening" organized every year in the desert of Nevada. The original event took place over thirty years ago on a small beach in San Francisco. It grew so big that the event had to be relocated to the more remote location but was still the kind of DYI, spontaneous event that took place outside of all considerations of commerce and marketing. It would seem that this has radically changed over the years. To quote one person in the article :

People have less and less time to be radically self-reliant,

Having followed this type of social experiment several times, through the rise and fall of MP3.com and also through interaction with Wikipedia (and also indirectly, following Kildall and Stein's "Wikipedia Art" project.), it seems apparent to me that some sort of process takes place to metamorphose social structures which are evolving freely, along organic structural lines into social structures which become hierarchical, forcibly controlled from above by a set of social conventions which purport to be based on the idea of free expression, but which are manipulated by interior and external forces into artificially controlled structures. The emphasis on commerce and marketing is a principal symptom, but is not (in my mind) the primary cause.

I was rereading Nassim Taleb's essay in Art de Vamy's "Evolutionary Diet" today and was taken with Taleb's idea of "Wild randomness", but he derives from his work with Benoît Mandelbrot. It seems to me that this concept can be developped as a means of explaining this type of process...

Gilles Magnin Paris Berlin "intime-extime", exposition at Lagny Town Hall

The photographer Gilles Magnin is one of my neighbors here at the Marcheoise. This Summer, the Town of Lagny hosted an exposition of his photographs from June 8th until August 31st. During the last few days of the exposition, Magnin gave a series of commentated visits of the exposition, explaining his artistic process and the references he was using in order to convey meaning I attended the last of these visits and had a chance to discuss this exposition with the artist.

The main theme as Magnin explains it on his own blog (text in French) is a sort of mirroring of each place through impression, rather than objective views of defined subjects. The object as a definition of value figures highly in this collection of images, as does the device of how the observers defines value through his examination of objects and details.

I felt that the most powerful images were those which did not attempt to overly define the themes suggested, but which allowed the viewer to question his own perception of the images and their juxtaposition with the rest of the exposition. The direct dialogue with the artist himself was an interesting way to follow his own artistic process and gave me some ideas of how to use these ideas in my own.

It is a pity that this type of philosophical exchange is so rare here, especially given the population of artists involved...

The reason behind this blog.

Yesterday was the "forum des associations" in this small town in Seine et Marnes. As the music director of the Town Band, I had to spend most of the day manning our stand in order to recruit new members and communicate to people about exactly what it is that we do. The event takes place in a gymnasium which is almost always a furnace by the end of the day. As there weren't that many people there to begin with, I began to occupy myself by reading various things that people had left on our table.

I noticed a stack of brochures for something called "ArtBorescence" and realized that I knew most of the people listed. As a matter of fact, the majority were my neighbors here at La Marchoise...none of whom I saw during the course of the day. The other name was that of a former mayor of Lagny...who I did see. As a matter of fact, I saw pretty much everyone that I know here in Lagny at one point or another...but not one of the people who live in this reconverted factory which specialized in processing fur and hides. I certainly had heard nothing of this exposition, although I had a stack of these brochures next to my own material about the Band.

I found this to be rather ironic, since La Marchoise and the Town Band is rather entwined, and on several different levels. Many of the people who play in the band used to work here when it was in operation. This direct connection with the life of the town and the Marcheoise is one of the reasons why I accepted the position of Town Band Director when it was offered to me over ten years ago.

Back then, in the dark ages before Twitter and other online services started occupying most of of our attention, not many people were online...At least not in the way that they are online today. So, my online life was very separate from my IRL existence. In the course of five or so years, this has changed radically and it seems that I find out more about my neighbors from the Facebook page that some of them have set up than from any spoken discussions or other direct interactions.

It seemed to make more and more sense to communicate using this medium, to convey ideas about what this place is, what this place could be and why I think that this process should take place. Whether or not this will be useful is another question...