Allen Viguier

Cet essai propose une esthétique contextualiste de l'œuvre d'art dont le paradigme est rapporté à l'artefact de design. Présenté en deux livres, il maintient la spécificité de chacun des deux domaines tout en rendant compte de leurs échanges incessants depuis le début des avant-gardes historiques.  Le premier livre débute par l'examen de neuf monochromes rouges imaginés par Arthur Danto et fait appel à l'esthétique institutionnelle de Howard Becker pour les placer dans le contexte des pratiques curatoriales et du "monde de l'art". Une approche contextualiste et empirique qui croise des références à la théorie de l'art, à la théorie institutionnelle, au constructivisme et à la systémique.  Le second livre déplace le propos dans le domaine du design. L'histoire de l'art moderne et contemporain et l'histoire du design sont inséparables. Il s'agit pourtant pour chaque discipline de retirer de l'autre ce qui lui revient en propre. L'artefact de design existe dans le contexte de la société et non de l'art et il est lui-même le répartiteur d'un contexte au travers du projet.

From the book's point of view post-object art did twice better than generally acknowledged. It not only sabotaged the physical object's static substance ontology but also reformulated what an object is. A new object to start again with. By reestablishing the object beyond its physical instability through processual invariance, it can then be observed in the context of its external relations and hence as having no ontological primacy over them. By bracketing the object and suspending its internality, both the object and the curatorial frame can be observed as working synchronically, correlated at a placeless boundary or interface.

Book, 2005. B&W and colour digital print on paper. A4 format. Unbound. This project was developed during a stay in Broken Hill and the region, it was supported through the artist-in-residence program at the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong in August 2005 and it was edited during the following months. A full copy of the book is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library and Archive; the Médiathèque, Musée du Quai Branly, Collection des Récits de Voyageurs; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Paris.

In the book’s two texts concepts of art "return" from the past, mostly from the founding narrative of contemporary art, but they are not taking us back to the past. The past that is recovered in our present is a measure of the distance that separates us from it. The texts' central proposition operates through the bracketing of objects. By suspending its own internality an object allows itself to be examined through its external relations in the material context of art and institutional practices. Its customary literalness and self-reflexiveness are turned round into a working method for unfolding and investigating its own contextual complexity. What an artwork is is also what it does and makes us do. Through its agency, it engages a coordinated collective of people, practices and objects. Its event questions the boundaries of personhood and consciousness, and it decenters the anthropocentric as well as the generic spectator. Somewhere in between the academic's talk (what I am thinking) and the artist's talk (what I am doing) theoretical discourse can exemplify the representational as being routed in live performance and material externality.