Etienne Chambaud & Benoît Maire, The Current Position of Idealism, 2008, raft, GPS system

Etienne Chambaud and Benoît Maire are two young French artists with theory-based practices, the latter of whom has gone so far as to say that theory is his medium. Occasional collaborators, the pair’s most recent joint effort was featured in Chambaud’s first Paris solo exhibition, “Les Abîmes,” at Galerie Lucile Corty in Jaunary 2008. On the far side of the second-floor gallery was a small handmade raft and a large map on the opposite wall. The piece is called Position actuelle de l’Idéalisme (The Current Position of Idealism). L’Idéalisme is also the name of the raft itself, which is fitted with a simple tracking device. During the course of the show, L’Idéalisme was set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. It signals its location with a system called Argos, which is normally used for tracking endangered species and boats in distress. While the piece had a certain physical charm, it seemed that its driving purpose was less aesthetic than an incitement to discourse. What follows is a conversation with the two artists, largely about the theories that inform their work.

The text is translated from the French.
 

Etienne Chambaud & Benoît Maire, Libido Post-Fiction, 2003, mixed media

David Lewis: Can we hear about the genesis of the project? How did the idea and the collaboration come about?

Benoît Maire: Etienne and I worked together on a project called Libido Post Fiction when we were students at the Villa Arson in Nice. The recurrent question in this project was to pose a basic narrative structure without pointing to any possible ending, offering, like bait, a de-teleologized story, without a goal. Then, two or three years later, in 2005, I wrote a kind of manifesto, titled New Chaotic Idealism, in which I chaotically laid out an unrestrained reflection on the same subject, the order of an event. Talking about it with Etienne, I asked myself what would come of this project—its issue and its possible ending. Etienne proposed that I throw all the copies of the manifesto into the sea.

Around this time, we worked together on another piece, this one about the question of an eventand its resolution in a kind of mental image. We wanted to question a moment in the history of thought, Nietzsche’s collapse in Turin, when, crying, he grabbed the neck of a horse while it was being beaten. That was when he went crazy. We appropriated one of Nietzsche’s piano compositions, which has pity as its theme. That was the context for Position actuelle de l’Idéalisme—the question of the event, its impossible ending, an abstract visualization instead of a classical representation, the question of idealism, and the fact of not knowing how to get rid of it. We arrived at the idea of a raft containing all these things. What do you think, Etienne?
 

Etienne Chambaud & Benoît Maire, Music for a Hundred-Year Old Horse, 2006, piano, bench, paper

Etienne Chambaud: Abstract visualization and an impossible ending—and you could also say impossible form—qualify a mental image. It’s a type of image that was very present in our discussions of that time. It’s the only type of image that doesn’t wear me out. In this idea of a mental image, there is an irreducible opposition between the abstraction of the content—an overture, without ending—as much as a disappearance of meaning and the necessarily fragmented form, incomplete, practically impossible. To rephrase, a mental image is a fragmented construction that never ends up finished, or with itself. It’s very close to a memory, but not the memory of a lived experience.

Over a few drinks, we spoke of Nietzsche’s collapse in Turin and of returning to a mental image of this event in a work that we were going to call Musique pour un cheval centenaire (Music for a Hundred-Year-Old Horse). I say “return” because another characteristic of a mental image is its double capacity, appearing and disappearing: if an image can be haunted, it is always haunting [hantante]. It so happens that there had already been a mental image—a story of a dream—of this event in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which appeared about ten years earlier and which Nietzsche had certainly read. The Turin Event was thus already written, and its mental image came back doubly: Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, and Nietzsche, both falling, the one in fiction, the other in Turin, crying on the neck of a horse. We talked about a monument to this double horse. We approached it by way of Nietzsche’s sentimental music, amplified by our own ineptitude as amateur pianists. We wanted to hone in on the mental image by means of its affect. What is the affect of a monument in the place of a monument? Is it just a remainder? These are the types of questions that we asked ourselves when we began to talk for the first time about how to give up idealism. I suggested that Benoît throw the remaining copies of the manifesto into the sea in a trunk that he could find again later—to sink idealism! Idealism was the theory—or was it the affect?—that came out of Benoît’s manifesto. Then, rather quickly, idealism became more abstract, an idea without a precise definition, something intimate, conceptual, and vital at the same time—that which concerns undoing. How to give up a theory… How to let go of a concept… We thought of a raft that would endlessly come back to its position, a non-definitive abandonment, an abandonment that endlessly refers to its status as abandoned.

DL: But why idealism, of all things? Is it the idea of idealism in general, or political idealism, aesthetic idealism, or above all, Benoît’s new chaotic idealism? Or is idealism simply the figure of the impossible end, the end without end?

EC: I’ll turn the question back to you. The idea is over-determined. There’s antique idealism, problematic idealism, immaterialist idealism, empirical idealism, transcendental idealism, voluntarist idealism, absolute idealism—some of it is even German! So, to answer your question about idealism, I’d briefly respond: it is a raft. But does one name a raft like one names a boat, a concept, or a work of art?

DL: But it’s not just idealism, like it’s not just a raft. It’s the current position of idealism, so, like Benoît said, it’s about our time, during or after postmodernism. Let’s hear more about the relationship between art and history today. Let’s hear about the current position of idealism—or art.

BM: No one can say in what age he lives. That person has not yet been born. It’s always the theorists who try to make paradigms for their own time. Etienne and I could have been influenced by structuralism and the theorists of postmodernism, but we only knew them vaguely, and in “vaguely” [vaguement], there is a “wave” [vague], and waves are the result of movements in the interior and exterior of the ocean, imprinting turbulences on its surface. I have the impression that our age is dominated by a reading of Lacan, and that certain theorists try to think based on Lacan, who proposed a quasi-delirious thought based on the aesthetics of language. But the word “aesthetics” here is to be understood in the strong sense: it is a complete theory of existence, based on a re-centering of the question, “what are the possibilities of the subject?” Like Lacan, I think that the crucial thing is to name. By naming the raft L’Idéalisme, we used the notion of idealism as an empty vessel, as Etienne says, a totally enormous notion that everyone fills as they please. Idealism is the name given to a raft, so it’s a specific idealism, not the German one, not the one that opposes itself to materialism; it’s the name of a raft that we set to sea and whose position we track. In some ways, our job is mainly to say: “The name ‘idealism’ is at sea.” We abandon it, and then we inquire about its position.

To permit myself an aside, I would say that this idealism is linked to youth. Also, to bring back the metaphor of a suffering horse, idealism is carrying a heavy load, pitied by Nietzsche; we also find this in Kierkegaard as a metaphor for the existentialist way of thinking. One could say that idealism, in the way that I approached it in the manifesto, was too large a task for me, for us, and in general, for the community. So, we let it go. We abandoned the concept because it was too big, and now we can just find it somewhere else.

Thinking about rafts in the history of art, we could, if we really wanted to, link the question of idealism to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. What do the survivors on the raft share? Hope, I think, to touch dry land again, to be rescued, in short, to survive a situation. In calling the raft L’Idéalisme, we link it to the notion of hope. But it’s not just about the hope for survival. InPosition actuelle de l’Idéalisme, we’re also thinking about the hope of meaning because, for a work of art, the hope is that its meaning advances or at least survives, or occurs. To name a raft is to baptize it. And baptism is the performative act par excellence: it does what it says. In this sense, our work is like a baptism, an enunciation, a performative speech act. Or rather, our work stems from baptism, which stems from enunciation. After this initial performance (or enunciation), we abandon what we’ve named to the sea, to its path. Again an old image comes back to me: that of Moses saved in the water. But everything I say here is only an approximation based on associations of ideas. [One image] remains though: a raft with a name, drifting on the sea. To come back to your question, if you ask about history, we do it with a special filter that isart history.

EC: As Baudelaire said, memory is the criterion of art. There’s a persistence of Raft of the Medusa in Delacroix’s Barque of Dante. There is a hollow presence. There is, in the history of art, a presence of residual images. For Baudelaire, it’s what constitutes an artistic tradition: the transmission of potential meanings. Seen in this way, memory is the medium of painting. It’s hardly coincidental that these two paintings that Baudelaire discusses are about survival. The idea can also be turned around. Residual images can be retroactive: the Barque can also drift upstream to change the Medusa. Each one elaborates the other in memory. From this point of view, one can ask oneself what our raft might be reaching as it drifts upstream. Today the raft is at large in South America, over six hundred miles from the Guyanese Coast, with the ocean on which it drifts becoming a metaphor for these possible memories, and possibly the place of its disappearance to come. There is a symbolic drift of the raft, paralleling its drift on the ocean, a drift in time, in history, and notably, in the history of art. I understand the history of art and the history of ideas in this context as a history of survival. Survival of meaning? But, within this symbolic drift, the raft can never be truly pinned down, never precisely.

DL: Can you talk about conceptual art?

BM: Conceptual art is, I think, the current filter, paradigmatic of our time. Or we could just say that this piece can be read with the aid of that filter. When I refer to conceptual art, it is in order to name something that cannot be seen. This is the base of conceptual art, its immaterial slope. It’s clearly about delineating a concept, not about exposing its flesh and bones but rather the facts of its design, or else to name it. One can therefore also say that conceptual art is art that addresses questions on the exhibition project as such. I think that the principle of conceptual art is to exhibit what it does not show. In this sense, it is truly language, as long as language replaces the thing. As Thierry de Duve said, it’s not representation that’s important, it’s not even the space of presentation any more, but only the space of the present.

Etienne Chambaud & Benoît Maire, The Current Position of Idealism, 2008

EC: In conceptual art, there might, historically speaking, be two types of artists, two rather similar ways of undoing subjectivity. On the one hand, there are those who want to predict the work in advance, every tiny detail, before its execution. The original idea of the work almost substitutes for the artist, who is essentially a machine that makes the art. And then, there are those who see in chance effects the means to reduce their intervention in the process to a minimum. After this, it gets more complicated. But one of the principal ideas is this: no more subjectivity. When Benoît speaks of a return to a conceptual art, he might mean the attempt to abandon, without end, the question about where whatever it is that was abandoned ends up, or drifts towards. Paradoxically, we almost have the answer. The abandonment of the raft is quite pathetic because the ocean currents are well mapped. We can almost predict what’s going to happen. There are variations depending on the winds and weather, but we can approximate its direction and speed. If there’s no randomness, can we still call the drifting of the raft a derive, like the one from Guy Debord’s theory? It’s happening now: the raft is at sea, and yes, it drifts, but in a known, predictable current. The technical system that we’re using is used by scientists to study currents, to detect meteorological anomalies or animals in danger of extinction. We use an extremely simplified version. Our system does not indicate anything other than the raft’s position, one time every three days. And one time per three days, it confirms, for the moment, what was supposed to happen. So, what are we waiting for? An accident? An event? What could happen? Not much. The possibilities at sea are almost the same as those in an exhibition.