NOBROW

Action-installation "Ars apocalyptica, pour une nouvelle tentative de restauration" Tome 2 au Frac aquitaine dans le cadre de la deuxième partie de l'exposition collective  "Caprice des jeux". Installation-action "Ars apocalyptica, for a new restoration attempt" Tome 2 at the "Frac Aquitaine" in the context of the second part of the "Caprice des jeux" group show, (the installation-action has been executed into the stocking area of the FRAC aquitaine's public art collection in Bordeaux). 

"Ars apocalyptica" is a performance offering an apocalyptic vision of art, which keeps reminding us of the fragility of art making whithin any society focusing on its own economic and political interests. It points out the artistic production system symetry evolving at the expense of other parallel industrial systems by laying emphasis on two types of opposite actions; the first one concerns the making and the piling up of objects constituting one of the art mechanism, the second one deals with the sticking up of an advertising poster which symbolizes one of the industrial gesture unherited from the communication system.
 
Such as the ritual which rules the archaic thought system, "Ars apocalyptica" rationalizes its own space according to the positive/negative opposition universal diagram, which springs up "ab origin" and keeps updating throughout the various phases of the human history. The action unwound in a total claim of the apocalyptic concept takes place within a space marked out by objects, made according to a well-established chaos aesthetics. In their contents and forms, those objects meet the same diagram previously mentionned, i.e deliberately using white and black sketches on packing cardboard, turned away from its initial use of shipping goods, and which is a fundamental element in the huge industrialization process we are confronted to.
 
Both actions simultaneously taking place in a relatively short time mutually feed themselves, as in any hostile and tensely opposed  system; the assertions and attacks of some protagonistslive on the ones of others, to precisely give them an antagonist meaning and bring them to life.
 
Time and space in which the action takes place have a ritual cosmogony function, responding to the principles of archaic ceremonials, such as the one of the Akitu which implied a course of tragic events among which the abolition of passed time, the chaos restoration, the social order reversal, (slaves becoming masters) and the elimination of the scapegoat ...
 
"Ars apocalyptica" symbolic strenght lies in the organization of a kind of materialism including two aspects:
 
 -The first aspect is a dialectic one which is usually linked to rules external to the art syllabus it depends on and to to which it is totally submitted. The displaying of the poster raises the question of the relationship of the artists involved in it, lay out artists, graphic designers, all of them submitted to act, influenced by a
politicized hierarchic body, but also of its viewers confronted to one of the very principle of "symbolic deculturation" by means of communication.
 
 -The second aspect is a historic one, asserting that the circumstances of a social reality  do engender a consciousness to art and according to its contextual level of hostility and fight offers a range of actions for the artists as well as a pictural lexicon. This second aspect is reinforced during the course of the event,  i.e the simultaneously building of two industrial pallets topped with pilled up  cardboard boxes on which sketches have been painted. The fragility of these two mounts made up with empty boxes, clearly unstable once the assembly is achieved, raises the question of the fragility of some industrial processes, among which the ones linked to operating methods used by the present artistic supremacies.
 
Thus, "Ars apocalyptica" offers as many symbolic gestures as possible dialectic relations, able to raise one of the current problematics i-e, the indifferenciation complex between art and culture.
 
Isn't present art, which is fed on processes inherent in any other parralel using system, prone to the same future as humanity, since it is derived from a similar foundation?