Page 25 - Studio International - March 1973

painting has one particular 'outside' : China. Suprematism gives back to colour its signifying affirmed as principle, origin, reserve, reservoir
China, for both contemporary reasons (the function. The traditional chromatic function to which corresponds a telos (finality). (In the
Chinese revolution and the great proletarian was to colour in, to fill in shapes. These shapes course of this analysis and demolition we use
cultural revolution) and ancient ones (the old were themselves installed within pictorial the concept of logocentrism as Jacques Derrida
Chinese dialectical-materialist philosophy and production and formed a compact and finished establishes it in De la Grammatologie, pp. II/12;
the ideographic writing-system) can reveal a lot geometry (of a Euclidian kind), blocking the we also draw on the writings of Marcelin
for the theory and the practice of painting. infinity of combinations that this chromatic Pleynet in Art International). This system hardly
This confrontation forces provincial Western code produces. permits the apprehension of simultaneities, nor
ethnocentrism to measure itself against its Third comment. Dadaism and the New the synchronic cross-section of the 'structure of
`hidden side', which is nonetheless working Realism: disappearance of the format and organization of concepts in the totality of thought
on the West from within, on the international the canvas/stretcher coupling. But this in the system' (Althusser, Lire le Capital, vol. 1,
scene of a history made by landmarks. disappearance is not thought out at all and ends p. 83), thereby repressing dialectical materialism
5. The articulation of these three last points : in a redoubling of the ideological effect: plinths as a technique for such approaches. In the
Experimental practice and empiricist staging succeed from the logocentric system, meaning pre-exists the act
Linguistics, semiotics theatricality of the Renaissance, imposing a kind and one can understand how painting has
Chinese thought and writing of reading which is ultimately classical. attached itself — through theories of imitation
with Marxism-Leninism Nonetheless these two 'avant gardes', as an and representation — to a deciphering of this
Psychoanalysis activity of rejection, posed the problem of meaning in the world, and to a submitting of its
The thought of Mao Tse-Tung ideological elements contained within the `signifying arsenal' to a reality that is considered
should allow us to produce a certain number of pictorial field. But for want of a coherent to be sovereign truth. Through criticism,
concepts constituting the science of painting, a theoretical platform they were fated to become rejections, rupture related to other fields
new practice of painting, and to produce polemical and aesthetic games. (political: the rupture of 1871, the Commune,
weapons for the struggle against idealism and its Recuperation Cezanne), painting succeeds in restoring
corollaries, State monopoly capitalism and Ideological recuperation develops according to productivity to the signifying function.
imperialism. the laws of narrative and invites us to make an The economy of idealist thought is not by any
To change the bases of painting is not to inventory of acquired cultural facts according to means halted but finds itself in a position of
change the world, but is contributing to the a linear, non-dialectical scheme (art history). repetition, of enclosure if not of ending.
world's changing its basis. Peinture: Cahiers This is a history computed as for book-keeping. The symptoms of this enclosure are
Theoriques will contribute. (Its laws will be those of accounting' — manifested in the prodigious accumulation of
J.-L. Schefer in Tel Quel no. 41 'Notes on `works' of art (this accumulation corresponding
(The following is an extract from an article representative systems'). to the crises of overproduction that
in the same number `Towards a programme of Moreover, the general mechanism of characterize the capitalist system), or in that
pictorial theory' by Louis Cane and recuperation presents the object of knowledge permanent novelty of an avant garde
Daniel Dezeuze.) (that painting is) as a real object (an object of condemned to chew the cud of its own (idealist)
exchange, a possession like furniture) and this is problematics.
Critical introduction concerned with the where the question of sale arises. The 'epistemological ruptures' produced by
words School, Avant Garde, Recuperation, Sale the unprecedented encircling of the human
Sale This question can only be discussed if we sciences by the objective sciences signal the
School restore its level (the economic level) in relation emergence of historical materialism as the
The word 'school' in art is a creation of to the specificity of the ideological level where enclosing of empirical practices, as the science
criticism in the service of the dominant ideology. pictorial practice inserts itself. The explanation of these ideologies and/or as a science to be
But the novelty that a school contains — or is of sale prices has the function of making clear constituted. Many are the illusions of
deemed to contain — is often merely the the contradictions of the system, outside any scientificity in the domain of painting.
multiplication under different aspects of the culpabilism (unhappy conscience) and outside Technological art, wanting to give itself the
same idealist scheme repeating itself inside its any economism (mechanistic attitude). Thus if status of a science, simulates a rupture that it
enclosure . . . Art criticism calls this we want to analyse systematically the economic cannot in fact assume, for — in the course of
mechanism a 'school' and so maintains its network underlying pictorial production we radically reducing the dialectics of history into a
aesthetic, historical and often financial control must couple this activity with the actual dialectic generative of successive modes of
over it. So it is outside this nomenclature and exhibiting of this pictorial production . . . production and still more of different techniques
outside the word 'school' that the facts of of production (cf. McLuhan) — it becomes itself
pictorial production must be investigated; these Towards a programme of pictorial theory pure technicity and a closed area of
facts of production allow us to approach the One of the consequences of traditional artistic technological discourse.
specific object, 'painting', as object ofknowledge. language is the concealment of the object of If a theoretical activity can articulate itself
Avant Garde knowledge, 'painting', behind aesthetico- only through a complete break marking the
Three comments on the avant garde by way of spiritual phraseology moving within the closed mutation of a pre-scientific activity into a
example. circle of an ideology. The elaboration of a scientific theory/practice, this qualitative leap
First comment. Cezanne exhibits with the materialist and dialectical theory asks for the can be achieved only by a return to traditional
impressionists for the last time in 1877. He is demolition and analysis in the object of the pictorial activities. By which means, these
about to systematically demolish scenic space as whole ideology of the political and economic activities can if necessary give account of the
introduced by perspective. Hence the system in force, which, underlying the texture nature of the theoretical formations of their
disappearance of projection in depth, of the of culture, has the effect of denaturing the object history, and of their specific conceptual
theatrical representation of the 'ego' and a `picture' in the historic functioning of its condition/constitution through that history.
certain 'expressive' effect. Beginnings of a definition (the object 'picture' apprehended as a Idealism tends to bury this history in art history,
restitution of surface effects (flattening, real object, and not as an object of knowledge). in circuits of cultural distribution, or in the
fragmentation). attitudes of an anti-art which rejects all history
Second comment. The Russian avant garde Logocentrism characterizes the system of and leads to a 'no place' whose void is
(Suprematism and Rayonnism, 1913-1917). western culture: logos and meaning are therein immediately filled by the dominant ideology. q

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