I see no reason to hide the everyday origin of ideas, may it be automotive.
P. Petiot
The following of my article in L’Or aux Treize Îles 😀
For the avoidance of doubt… I didn’t understand anything, but it’s very beautiful! 😀
J.C. Belotti
Ah, I heard the ending while driving! Thanks, I’ll listen to it all!
P. Petiot
I was also in my car, but stopped in the yard in front of my house. I was coming home from shopping. Despite the heat, I didn’t get out of the car until the radio program was over… 😀
After which, I spent the evening wandering along the mathematical slopes of Wikipedia. 😀
Which allowed me to see once again that the teaching of mathematics is a scandal and a shame. And no! It is not the fault of the mathematicians, but rather that, ubuesque, of the teachers and beyond that, that of the arrogance, even more ubuesque, of their managers.
Breton deals excellently with mathematical – or rather, and beyond, scientific – thought, at the end of the First Manifesto: he finds it to be surrealist – What else could it possibly be? 😀
But it seems that very few people (especially among the surrealists) have read the First Manifesto to the end 😂. And as for Breton, he quickly forgot what he had written on this topic, reducing his magnificent discovery to a trickle, to end up in a quite conformist way, reconnecting shamelessly with the endless exhibitions tradition. Exhibitions whose central and essential function is to silence the artist by reducing his intellectual adventure to a few results. And we know that the top of all results is reached at the bottom of the cash drawers.
In the end, surrealism will not even have succeeded in the arts, in approaching the freedom conquered by the artists of the Italian Renaissance, all more or less also engineers, poets, town planners (Michelangelo), or even renowned mathematicians in their time, like Piero della Francesca.
Vinci will have finally had this sinister destiny to have become the tree whose function remains to hide the existence of this marvelous forest…
After 20 years spent associating with the “surrealists” of this time and 10 years doing the same with the “pataphysiciens”, I have to admit that these two chapel spirits wander symmetrically. Ultimately, there is no exploration that does not require the use of methods, even if randomness happens to play the central role in some of these methods. The Surrealists have been criticized enough for being plain users of processes. Automatic writing is just one of these processes. But the surrealist movement ultimately invented many others. ‘Pataphysique, wishing to distance itself from Surrealism’s insistence on the Unconscious, reduced the general notion of procedure (in fact, as we will see, of transformation) to that of constraint, an approach that has now become somewhat dubious, since IT is now able (or almost able) to implement the type of fairly flat constraints that have been illustrated in the OuLiPo. The case of the OuPeinPo is even more explicit as to the fact that what the OuPeinPo called constraints were actually procedures, painting production processes, and therefore space exploration methods.
Mathematicians had however established at the beginning of the other century and at the end of the previous one that a geometry was the study of transformations. An evil mind might have seen it as a paraphrase of Marx’s slogan “The philosophers have only interpreted the world variously: now it is a question of transforming it.” “. But it seems we’ve run out of evil spirits.
Nevertheless, it proved that the space is to be lived in and not to be looked at – and even less to be contemplated. What Duchamp says clearly enough in his last work, that is to say “Étant donnés… ” at least, for who knows how to read…
From the discoveries of mathematicians (See for instance Henri Poincaré), there should normally have resulted a revolution in the visual arts. A revolution in which not space (which is only what we make of it) but transformations would have played the central role. It didn’t happen.
Despite Breton’s fine intuition as to “convulsive beauty”, we have remained with this stupidity of Baudelaire: “I hate the movement which displaces the lines” and therefore with this absurd merry-go-round of exhibitions, where the public passes in front of the works without even that beautiful anxiety – or that remarkable animal day dream – of cows watching a train go by.
By throwing away any idea of perspective, we have reduced the world to a blinding platitude, that is to say a Spectacle, and it is an understatement to say that thought has generally lost some depths in the process. Because every perspective designates a time – even if this perspective is ruled by randomness as Duchamp conceived it. So it is no accident that we now find ourselves confined to an eternal present in which, as Margaret Thatcher pointed out, “there is no alternative.” An echo of Lenin’s remark in the Duma about the Workers’ Opposition: “There will be no opposition any more!”
Gauguin’s famous but already somewhat flat questions: “Who are we? Where are we coming from? Where are we going?” have now been replaced by Pierre Dac’s well known humorous answers: “As far as I am personally concerned, I am myself, I come from home and I am returning there”.
Except that what the humor it once contained has now vanished.
https://zazie.at/Revamp-Duchamp/Index.htm
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