Page 41 - Studio International - October1973

etchings I've done. I'm interested in process. If
you decide to use a scrubby little brush you
probably work slowly. For myself, I paint very
quickly except when I paint deliberately slowly.
There is always a certain state of rebellion
against procedures and rules, but you need
certain formalities or rules otherwise there's
nothing to knock against.
People today are so conditioned to read or
think what they ought to like, they can't see that
one day we can paint one way, and two weeks
later one can paint completely differently. Look
at what Oldenburg's done. There's a whole
range of action. Why shouldn't painters have
a whole range of action ? It may be that because
of the fact that in painting certain achievements
are impossible to ignore. For me, Reinhardt's
black paintings or aspects of Morris Louis
present an ultimate situation that is something
to look to - and a prison, closing many roads. I
think to paint today it is essential to find out how
to get to a situation where action is relevant.
Having found this, you have to paint
compulsively and physically enjoy the activity.
Perhaps to stay within the area of paint and
canvas today you need a natural gift, the gift
of ignorance. I don't believe in being creative. I
do believe in talent. Which is using what you
have. But talent does no more than set things
up. What really seems to matter is how you
manage when talent becomes irrelevant and you
are isolated.
In the end you have to settle for what you get.
After all it should be what you are.
Marc Devade
I don't worry about people's responses very Peinture 1972,150x 150 cm.
much . . . very arrogant in a way. But when I do through the poetic-psychological
something that's right - only one in five - you interpretations of the critical establishment,
know it's right; you don't measure your and, finally, the developments in the social
paintings against your public, you measure your sciences (sociology, linguistics, totally new to France (new due to a total lack of
public against your paintings. psychoanalysis) provided him - the painter - critical notice and exhibition): the great
with scientific methods for the analysis of his American colourists of the 1950s and 60s,
artistic practice. Pollock, Rothko, Newman, Louis, and others.
It was in the context of that profound In reality, the discovery of these painters was
The avant upheaval that, in 1970, a number of painters, scheme of a historical return based on
not made overnight. That would be part of a
united by friendship and common interests
garde today group Supports/Surfaces. But although several tendency according to which painting falls
based on their artistic practices, formed the
historical materialism in the face of a general
members of the group had thought simply to from heaven and the painter situates himself
To call oneself a part of the contemporary add a new avant garde to the already extant outside history. The path that led us to
avant garde in the field of painting presupposes, avant gardism, the remainder wanted to American painting begins with Cezanne (the
for our generation (those born around 1942), an emphasize the contradiction engendered by the break with the occidental pictorial code
awareness of a break that took place in France very foundation of the group, to theoretically inherited from the Renaissance : scientific
in May 1968. analyse their own practice and the effect of its perspective), then continues on through
This break manifested itself in three ways: active inscription on contemporary painting. Matisse, Mondrian, Malevich and the Russian
partly by the direct eruption of politics into a One may say, first of all, that, in reaction to avant garde, Albers and the Bauhaus, and
domain that till then seemed untouchable (and the ambient avant gardism (neo-realism ; culminates in those opposite and complementary
the bourgeoisie did their utmost to keep it that Arman's 'accumulations'; Tinguely's poles, (Pollock and Newman) and the scission
way), the domain of 'culture', that is of painting `machines'; Klein's 'monochrome paintings'; engendered by them in the United States.
(but which also includes literature, film, Raysse's `wrappings'; Niki de Saint Phalle's Whereas an avant-gardist neo-academicism
theatre, philosophy, etc. . .); partly by the `nanas', etc. .. the neo-realism, the elementary inherited from Dada and Duchamp proliferated
typical substitution of the art critic for the and supposedly anonymous art of the group in the field of painting and its market, running
painter himself, which led to a situation where BMPT ; Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, parallel to a sort of neo-positivism with its
the artist began to feel fed up—which is to say Toroni; conceptual art, op art, kinetic art, repetitive logicism, the introduction of this new
that the subject of pictorial practice (the etc. . .) in reaction therefore to all this fetishism actuality was largely rejected in a chauvinistic
painter) came to realize that he had no need of a and reduction, to the morbid retention of and reactionary way by those who held, and
spokesman, that he must speak for himself in pictorial practice, there was a certain imagined themselves able to continue to hold,
order to expose his ideas, and need not pass fascination regarding what was at that time positions of importance in the field of painting.
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