“Just yesterday, what to do?”: a speech by Pierre Carron

This speech was delivered on 28 November 2012 during “Une Journée à l’Académie”. Listen to the recording and read the Institut de France’s introduction (in French).

Just yesterday, what to do? A speech by Pierre Carron.

A history that begins with that of humanity, when humankind, barely freed from its animal condition, invented art by reversing death in a representation of life and placing primordial images in new settings through unprecedented means: one of its earliest gestures.

From this initial perfection, the theme continued to expand until it became a project on the scale of the universe: to establish an earthly echo of what moves across the heavens.

Everywhere, we witness extraordinary upsurges of stone, the materialisation of episodes lived or dreamed by humanity, the raising up of everything that pulses behind the surface of appearances, celebrations of the body and its gestures, and the emergence of a whole population of creatures previously invisible. Those initiated into this kind of liberation seem to draw them from the matrix in which they had slumbered, fossilised, since the beginning of time, and then set them before us, sparkling and alive, truer than what they describe, truer than nature.

Works that seem to follow an initial design: the simultaneous advance of two worlds in constant interaction, those of art and life, in which what disappears from one under the action of passing time reappears in the other. Art continues along its course of evolution, from generation to generation and rebirth to rebirth, whatever upheavals occur.

At the end of each ultimate stage of decline, like the phoenix rising from its ashes, art draws on its own logic and finds within itself the resources necessary for its development. From its past it draws the futures contained there, through ancestral processes and practices that are constantly reinvented and reinterpreted, but never abandoned as they are today. Indeed, only yesterday, the studio, the school and the museum were privileged places of learning. The experience of an artwork through copying brought the apprentice fully into the mysteries of the craft, placing them within a lineage and enabling them to take up the baton handed on by distant or immediate predecessors. This was a conception founded on inheritance, memory and transmission, opposed to the one that has taken hold today, in a time seemingly struck by amnesia, when the ancient worship of beauty has been replaced by that of creation ex nihilo.

The art of former times, as we might already call it, is being replaced by something else that retains its name and ceremonial trappings, yet becomes a simulacrum under the incongruous label of contemporary art, in the image of what it represents. This simulacrum invades the entire cultural sphere and the spirit of the age. A label of superior quality reserved for creatures elevated to the rank of creators; a system in which the very absence of art in a work becomes one of the principal criteria of quality. This is confirmed by the sanctification of rubbish destined for the bin, of scraps and nothings arising from the lingering odour of the old urinal, accompanied by the extravagant theories and pronouncements of those too intelligent to be honest. A production marked by monochrome, lacerations, splashes, asphalted spaces, scatological and desecrating art; in short, an adherence to a world in which everything is its opposite, in the most perfectly obligatory eclecticism. A matter of taste and colour that renders any position or definition useless, without an object. Does the Platonic definition of beauty as the splendour of truth, so embarrassing in the contemporary context, not therefore become obsolete?

And finally, the museum, arranging the juxtaposition of next to nothing with the masterpieces in its possession, attempting in this way to justify nothing through everything.

A new conception of art that supposedly corresponds to a world that has changed; a new order, that of mental disorder in any case. Staged displays that claim to be intelligible to everyone but, despite intense propaganda, remain reserved for a select circle of right-thinking people.

On the other hand, it should be stressed that a number of people seemingly lost in time, without an approved label although they are contemporary, have not yielded to the diktat and still tirelessly pursue the adventure.

I quote, on the subject of Manet’s Olympia in 1863: ‘The opera, a true revolution: the transformation of things into an autonomous, coherent and individual pictorial universe’ (Malraux).

Manet stands at the origin of the great tendencies of modern painting, from Gauguin to Matisse, from Fauvism to abstract art.
Here is a perfect example of what is asserted as self-evident, as an inescapable starting point for reflection, as people say, in order to understand the modern period intelligently. Certainly, Olympia caused a scandal, but undoubtedly not because of its pictorial language, nor because of its treatment of the theme. In any case, to credit it with originating modern art, and abstract art into the bargain, defies understanding. The spirit of the age delights in such incongruous connections and readily performs intellectual contortions whenever the present must be justified through the past, preferably in defiance of common sense, and all the more readily when no relationship between the genres can be established. Indeed, why should something that, by definition, resembles nothing have to resemble something?

Pierre Carron, November 2012

English translation. Read the original French text.