THE MYSTERY OF THE ROSE

Raphaël Brunel, 2009

Published in 02 magazine, winter 2009/2010, n°52

Conatus – Episode 6: The rose is without a why
Previously on Conatus:
After traversing a disturbing forest, exploring the walls of a cave with pop reflections, founding a masked community in the Lot region that is as psychedelic as it is wild, and running into a tap dancer in the middle of the night, Boris Achour has a mysterious encounter with a 17th-century rose in Reims that, like all true beauties, proclaims its independence. As for the characters: the mobiles aren’t really mobiles, the stencils have been shaped by giants and the vegetation is made of extruded polystyrene.

The following reveals the key moments in the plot.

Since 2006, Boris Achour has been working on a form of temporality for the exhibition inspired by the sequential structure of TV series. Each event takes the form of an episode that functions, with its title, setting and specific characters, as an autonomous element while always being linked, by a system of hyperlinks, reminders and sometimes incongruous associations, to the logical nebula of Conatus. In The Ethics, Spinoza describes conatus as the will to persevere in one’s being, and makes desire and passion into driving and creative forces, thus inducing an idea of dynamics, of a step-by-step rise to power. By placing himself under the aegis of this concept, Boris Achour is less interested in illustrating at all costs a philosophical argument about creation – which is, after all, commonplace – than in identifying an operating mode reminiscent of the episodic nature of the TV series. While the heterogeneity of his works has been widely commented on over the last fifteen years, the idea of conatus allows him to unify, or at least to bring together, the paradoxes and opposites at play in his artistic practice.

The title of this exhibition-episode is taken from the first line of a seventeenth-century poem by the German theologian and poet Angelus Silesius. As Bernard Marcadé rightly points out in the fanzine accompanying the exhibition, it would be futile to try and explain why Boris Achour chose this short poem, or to attribute a real raison d’être to it. It does, however, hold up a mirror to a certain approach to art, putting into perspective the almost anachronistic and outdated question of the autonomy of the work. And it is here, on the slippery slopes of ambiguity, that the artist shows himself to be most at ease, assuming with a certain equilibrium the uncomfortable position of having his « ass between two chairs ». While his work seems to stand on its own merits, he also pulls out all the stops to create an exhibition that resembles a landscape, in which the viewer has to wander around, turn and turn again to get to grips with his surroundings. Boris Achour’s work is a permanent in-between, less a matter of not making a choice than of avoiding authoritarianism.

The characters we meet in Reims are all more or less affected by a mild schizophrenia. With their own light source, the mobiles are made up of disparate elements, standardised products and poor materials, reflecting less Boris Achour’s temptation for an artificial low-tech aesthetic than his connivance with Robert Filiou’s principle of equivalence and a form of workshop pragmatism. Not at all kinetic, but rather immobile, these mobiles appear in fact as a set of scales subweighing forms that are a priori irreconcilable. The large stencils that punctuate the space of the Frac, acting as entry points or wardrobes in a silent film, also have their share of mystery. Apparently already in use, they refer as much to the colossal size of their imaginary manipulator as to an off-screen area of the exhibition, an undisclosed place where the lines of Silenius’s poem would have been bombarded. Seeming to illustrate the rose more literally, stylised flowers unfurl in the space, depositing a strange perfume of aridity that contrasts with the diversity, from the most sober to the most pop, of the colours in their vases.

A purely evocative object, this poem allows Boris Achour, as usual, to set in tension the a priori contradictory objectives of unity and ensemble, to move back and forth from one to the other, in a movement that for many would be akin to the absurd, like Gombrowicz’s character in Cosmos for whom a hanging sparrow, Catherette’s mouth and Lena’s mouth are part of a strange constellation to be deciphered.