THE ROSE AND THE MUSSEL: RAMBLING REMARKS ON THE SIDELINES OF AN EXHIBITION BY BORIS ACHOUR

Bernard Marcadé, 2009

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Conatus: la rose est sans pourquoi at FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, September/November 2009 and distributed free of charge in the form of a photocopied 12-page edition including the text and views of the exhibition.

I have to confront this ‘Rose without Why’… And try to provide a reason, an explanation, for what from the outset appears to be without reason… I can see the trap into which we can fall. I’ll leave aside here the decisive reading of this quatrain by the Rector of Freiburg, because this interpretation leads us to metaphysical shores that I don’t want to come ashore on (Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason). If, by any chance, I ask myself what ‘reasons’ led Boris Achour to take an interest in this epigram, I run the risk of going round in circles. Obviously, there is no precise reason for this choice. No doubt the beauty of these phrases, their effectiveness, seduced him? Perhaps he intuitively substituted the word « art » or « work » for « rose »? The Rose is in fact said here in several senses. And it’s hard not to evoke Gertrude Stein’s famous A rose is a rose is a rose… which was later developed by Ad Reinhardt ( Art is art, life is life and everything else is everything else… ), then completed by Joseph Kosuth ( Art as Idea as Idea). Here we are circumvented by the demon of tautology. The rose would be without a why, because it is totally caught in the net of language. Prisoner of its signifier, its presence mourns its referent. We are immediately reminded of Mallarmé: I say: a flower! and, out of the oblivion where my voice relegates no outline, as something other than the chalices above, musically rises, idea itself and suave, the absentee of all bouquets (Stéphane Mallarmé, « Crise de vers », in Divagations).
In relation to Silesius, this approach is insufficient, even if the second line (« [The rose] blooms because it blooms ») may refer to the formalist doxa enunciated by Frank Stella: What you see is what you see. Perhaps the only way to move away from formalism is, in a coup de force that breaks down the barrier between plants and animals, to prosaically connect the mystical Rose of Silesius with the Belgian and trivial Moule of Marcel Broodthaers. « This cunning woman has avoided society’s mould / She has cast herself into her own / Others, resembling her, share the antimer with her. She is perfect. Like Silesius’s Rose, Broodthaers’s Mould is poetically perfect: it is its own model. This ideal mould (this idea of a mould?) is clearly an allegory of art for art’s sake, in other words, of an artistic situation with no way out and which blinds itself. It is radically different from this other mould, which, clumped together with its congeners, continues to proliferate in every mode and on every support (tables, chairs, paintings, etc.) offered to it by Marcel Broodthaers between 1964 and 1970. This mould, reflecting the situation of art « in the age of its technical reproducibility », is no more than a mould, in other words an empty form, devoid of any content, emptied of its use value. This mould is now destined to be nothing more than a manipulable and interchangeable object, in this case an art object. It can thus proliferate in every conceivable way, driven solely by the need for formal reproduction. To Gertrude Stein’s proposals, echoed by Reinhardt and Kosuth, Broodthaers replied ironically: Moi Je dis Je Moi Je dis Je / Le Roi des Moules Moi tu dis Tu / Je tautologue. Je conserve. Je sociologue. / Je manifeste manifestement. Au niveau de / mer des moules, j’ai perdu. / Je dis je, le Roi des Moules, la parole / des Moules. [Me I say I Me I say I / The King of Mussels Me you say You / I tautologize. I curate. I sociologize. / I manifestly manifest. / At the sea of mussels level, I have lost. / I say I, the King of Mussels, the language / of Mussels]. Underlying this poem (entitled Ma Rhétorique [My rhetoric]) is a critical look at the artistic context with which Broodthaers is associated, mainly conceptual art (which has historically made tautology a kind of new artistic credo), Pop Art (which has made the Campbell’s tin one of its favourite emblems), but also Surrealism (the only artistic movement to which Broodthaers clearly belonged. Magritte considered M.B. to be more of a sociologist than an artist).
In spite of what seems to bring them together (including erotically, see Rrose Sélavy!), Marcel Broodthaers’ mussel is not the rose of Angelus Silesius. Silesius’s rose is not a rhetorical device and cannot be used to stigmatise an aesthetic situation. It shines like a lost jewel in the midst of seventeenth-century European rationalism. I don’t think that Boris Achour is using this Rose as a war machine against the artistic conventions of his time (this Rose is, in its very deployment, irrelevant and untimely). I think it was the poem’s fulgurating power that grabbed him. A fulgurance close to insurrection (« La Révolution, ce sont les roses qui prennent feu » [The Revolution is roses catching fire](Saint-Pol Roux)). We must spare ourselves the intimidating readings and let ourselves be carried away by the floral sumptuousness of the epigram. The second line carries with it an expansive, explosive force that can rightly be likened to Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, itself the sister of Spinoz’s conatus, to which Boris Achour pays homage (the word is clumsy) in his plays. This power of affirmation, which imposes itself against the winds and tides of the laws of causality, which authorises itself only by itself, without any subservience to ideas of origin or finality, is a sovereign intensity that runs through the poem. The rose is indeed the name given by Silesius to what we today call a work. It is an insurrectionary power of the work that can only mock the snake biting its own tail of morbid tautology, even if it takes on the formal trappings of tautology.
« [La Rose] N’a souci d’elle-même, / Ne désire être vue » [[The Rose] cares not for iself, / Asks not if it is seen ]. Let’s keep spinning the metaphor. The work is an orphan, unfolding according to its own « plane of immanence ». Pure efflorescence, it exists for itself, without any purpose, not even that of being seen. This last line sounds today like a challenge to the famous It’s the viewers who make the paintings. This remark by Marcel Duchamp has become one of the most repeated topics of our artistic modernity, despite what the artist wanted to express with it in his time. In this remark, it is not so much the responsibility of the spectator that has been most often retained, as the omnipotence credited to the receptive sphere. If there is such a thing as the omnipotence of Silesius’s Rose, it is the omnipotence that makes it unfold beyond all attention and perception. This rose is sovereign; it depends only on its own unfolding. This conception does injustice to a whole aesthetics of reception which, as we know, is the mask of the sociology of art.
The being of the rose does not consist in being perceived. Would a work of art exist apart from the viewer? The scandal of such an assertion is obvious. I imagine, with a certain jubilation, that it was the scandalous, even indefensible, potential of this proposition that implicitly attracted Boris Achour’s choice. I don’t think that B.A. is an unbridled proponent of the ontology of the work. The Rose is effectively without a why. In the same way, the work is not accountable to either the artist or the public. What is at stake is its unfolding and, of course, its beauty.
The beauty of the poem is obvious. And we must not be afraid to confront this beauty. The dazzling, concise beauty that makes each of Angelus Silesius’s poems a dazzling burst of meaning and form. And therein lies the difficulty of this thought, for it is a thought inextricably linked to its eminently poetic and mystical form. We are dazzled by the beauty of each of these epigrams, and each time we run the risk of losing sight of what is at stake. But this loss is necessary, because it forces us to immediately abandon our certainties and experience our own emptiness, in other words, to fully exercise our sovereignty. (True emptiness is / Like a noble vessel / Containing nectar / It conceals, but knows not what). I like to think that it was the danger of confronting this beauty (and therefore this emptiness) that led Boris Achour to place his exhibition in Reims under the sovereign auspices of this Rose sans pourquoi.