Make and Think About Photography
Posted on July 31 2018
Author Stefano Chiodi
Translated by Jennifer Cooper
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Among the greatest contemporary historians and theoreticians of contemporary art, Jean-François Chevrier (1954) has developed in the last three decades an original reflection on the story and uses of the photographic image, seen as a field in relation to the visual arts tradition, with the media, literature, philosophy, in which a new balance between a speculative dimension and a sensitive sphere can be realized. After having founded the magazine «Photographies» in 1982, Chevrier focused on the reconstruction of a genealogy of the photography's artistic use, studying fundamental figures of modernism such as Walker Evans and Raul Hausmann, and therefore of the contemporary era, in contact with the production of artists such as Jeff Wall, whose is one of the most attentive interpreters, John Coplans, Marina Ballo Charmet, Patrick Faigenbaum. Besides being an academic and essayist - activities still little known in Italy (his most recent books are Hallucination artistique, 2012, and uvre et activité, 2015 )- Chevrier has also been curator, organizing exhibitions of wide resonance as Une autre objectivité (1988-89) and Walker Evans & Dan Graham (1992-94); in L'Action restreinte. The modern art selon Mallarmé (2004-05) and Formes biographiques (2013-15) proposed wide-ranging reinterpretations on key moments of visual and literary culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; he was principal consultant at documenta X (1997) and conceived the new staging of the Musée d'Unterlinden in Colmar (2016) with the architects Herzog & de Meuron.
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Walker Evans - Marcia Due, Virginia, 1973
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Jeff Wall, Fight On The Sidewalk, 1994
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I met Jean-François Chevrier in Paris, where in the last weeks the exhibition Raoul
Hausmann was held at the Jeu de Paume. Un regard en mouvement, an opportunity to rediscover his important photographic production realized between the twenties and the thirties of the last century.
Hausmann was held at the Jeu de Paume. Un regard en mouvement, an opportunity to rediscover his important photographic production realized between the twenties and the thirties of the last century.
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SC: What is your balance of the Hausmann exhibition at the Jeu de Paume?
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JFC: The choice to show only Hausmann's photographs is open to criticism, because his work is much more diverse and complex. At the same time it is not unreasonable, since among all the avant-garde artists, and particularly among those close to the dada - who at first had no interest in photography and even despised it as merely representative technique - Hausmann is the only one to have seriously devoted himself to photography.
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SC: His activity as an artist-photographer is in fact limited to the period from 1927 to about 1936, just under a decade.
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JFC: The discovery of the works of that period, at the end of the seventies, was a real revelation to me. In 1975 a book by Michel Giroud dedicated to Hausmann entitled Nous ne sommes pas des photographes was published in France, a phrase ("we are not photographers") taken from a text of 1921 in which Hausmann, the "dadasophe", as he wanted to be called , criticized photography as an instrument of aesthetic appropriation, that is to say, a compulsion to visual registration that places the operator in a position of domination and possession. You can be an artist-photographer only working against photography, producing images that allow you to fight the compulsive attitude of aesthetic appropriation. In Hausmann's eyes photography is the symptom of a spiritual handicap of the human being, which pushes him to subjugate the world to the mechanical parameters induced by the camera lens.
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SC: Yet the author of this radical critique just six years later began to devote himself to photography ...
JFC: The reason was understood only in 1986, in an exhibition in Vienna that had struck me very much (Raoul Hausmann, Fotografien 1927-1933). Hausmann was seriously interested in photography because it was the only way to combat the oppressive rules reported in the 1921 text. In other words, he practiced photography to fight against the psychological mechanisms of aesthetic appropriation and to take possession of a technique whose claim objectivity generally produces a falsification of perceptual and spiritual experience.
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SC: In your opinion, what is Hausmann's essential contribution to the relationship between photography and modern art?
JFC: Prove that photography could be practiced without succumbing to its improper use, so seriously, using it simultaneously with recording, description and contemplation. Hausmann wanted to use photography to take photographs directly. For him, contemplation was a sublimated form of eroticism that allowed to pour the experience of the beloved body into the environment, to make erotic metaphors appear in the morphology of the landscape: the folds, the undulations, the shivers of nature. This erotic value of the contemplative experience was for him the gateway to photographic lyricism.
SC: What is your balance of the Hausmann exhibition at the Jeu de Paume?
.
JFC: The choice to show only Hausmann's photographs is open to criticism, because his work is much more diverse and complex. At the same time it is not unreasonable, since among all the avant-garde artists, and particularly among those close to the dada - who at first had no interest in photography and even despised it as merely representative technique - Hausmann is the only one to have seriously devoted himself to photography.
.
.
SC: His activity as an artist-photographer is in fact limited to the period from 1927 to about 1936, just under a decade.
.
JFC: The discovery of the works of that period, at the end of the seventies, was a real revelation to me. In 1975 a book by Michel Giroud dedicated to Hausmann entitled Nous ne sommes pas des photographes was published in France, a phrase ("we are not photographers") taken from a text of 1921 in which Hausmann, the "dadasophe", as he wanted to be called , criticized photography as an instrument of aesthetic appropriation, that is to say, a compulsion to visual registration that places the operator in a position of domination and possession. You can be an artist-photographer only working against photography, producing images that allow you to fight the compulsive attitude of aesthetic appropriation. In Hausmann's eyes photography is the symptom of a spiritual handicap of the human being, which pushes him to subjugate the world to the mechanical parameters induced by the camera lens.
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.
SC: Yet the author of this radical critique just six years later began to devote himself to photography ...
JFC: The reason was understood only in 1986, in an exhibition in Vienna that had struck me very much (Raoul Hausmann, Fotografien 1927-1933). Hausmann was seriously interested in photography because it was the only way to combat the oppressive rules reported in the 1921 text. In other words, he practiced photography to fight against the psychological mechanisms of aesthetic appropriation and to take possession of a technique whose claim objectivity generally produces a falsification of perceptual and spiritual experience.
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SC: In your opinion, what is Hausmann's essential contribution to the relationship between photography and modern art?
JFC: Prove that photography could be practiced without succumbing to its improper use, so seriously, using it simultaneously with recording, description and contemplation. Hausmann wanted to use photography to take photographs directly. For him, contemplation was a sublimated form of eroticism that allowed to pour the experience of the beloved body into the environment, to make erotic metaphors appear in the morphology of the landscape: the folds, the undulations, the shivers of nature. This erotic value of the contemplative experience was for him the gateway to photographic lyricism.
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Raoul Hausmann Untitled February 1931
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Raoul Hausmann, Untitled, 1930
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SC: Along with Hausmann, another great artist-photographer you've dealt with is Walker Evans. What do these two figures have in common?
JFC: Neither of them stood in the position of the photographer who claims to be an artist, but both considered themselves artists who used photography. Let's not forget, among other things, that at the beginning, Walker Evans wanted to become a writer, not a "photographer". At the time, photography was either illustration, reportage, or artistic craftsmanship. Hausmann and Evans did not accept this alternative. Hausmann did not have a career as a reporter. He was unable to bend to the discipline required by the profession, and Evans did everything to avoid it: the conflicts he has known in the course of his activity as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration are proof of this. Lastly, they both chose their subjects. In this they opened up an opportunity today still important for those reporters who choose what to photograph, such as Ahlam Shibli or Santu Mofokeng, or even, before that, Robert Doisneau, about which we could talk about "reportage for private use".
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SC: Along with Hausmann, another great artist-photographer you've dealt with is Walker Evans. What do these two figures have in common?
JFC: Neither of them stood in the position of the photographer who claims to be an artist, but both considered themselves artists who used photography. Let's not forget, among other things, that at the beginning, Walker Evans wanted to become a writer, not a "photographer". At the time, photography was either illustration, reportage, or artistic craftsmanship. Hausmann and Evans did not accept this alternative. Hausmann did not have a career as a reporter. He was unable to bend to the discipline required by the profession, and Evans did everything to avoid it: the conflicts he has known in the course of his activity as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration are proof of this. Lastly, they both chose their subjects. In this they opened up an opportunity today still important for those reporters who choose what to photograph, such as Ahlam Shibli or Santu Mofokeng, or even, before that, Robert Doisneau, about which we could talk about "reportage for private use".
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SC: Both Hausmann and Evans "use photography to take photographs", as you said?
JFC: Yes, and it is a formula that allowed me, among other things, to conceive the exhibition Une autre objectivité, where Jeff Wall and John Coplans were present, as well as Robert Adams and others. The starting idea was simple: in the seventies, photographers were opposed to artists who used photography. This opposition lasted a long time, if you think that when I cured the exhibition Walker Evans & Dan Graham in 1992 I still clashed: on one hand, someone told me, you can not approach a conceptual artist to a master of the history of photography, and the latter expression was obviously full of derogatory connotation. On the other hand, it was repeated to me, you can not put such an important master alongside a conceptual artist who makes images without interest. I did my best to overcome this separation, trying to show that it is possible to be an artist, use photography and take pictures. The proof was clear in the case of two artists to who I was very close to, as Coplans and Wall: did they do anything other than taking pictures? At the same time, they were not photographers, they were really artists who used photography. So "artists who use photography to take photographs" is really the key expression. If you add "against the bad uses of photography" you get the complete formula.
SC: Both Hausmann and Evans "use photography to take photographs", as you said?
JFC: Yes, and it is a formula that allowed me, among other things, to conceive the exhibition Une autre objectivité, where Jeff Wall and John Coplans were present, as well as Robert Adams and others. The starting idea was simple: in the seventies, photographers were opposed to artists who used photography. This opposition lasted a long time, if you think that when I cured the exhibition Walker Evans & Dan Graham in 1992 I still clashed: on one hand, someone told me, you can not approach a conceptual artist to a master of the history of photography, and the latter expression was obviously full of derogatory connotation. On the other hand, it was repeated to me, you can not put such an important master alongside a conceptual artist who makes images without interest. I did my best to overcome this separation, trying to show that it is possible to be an artist, use photography and take pictures. The proof was clear in the case of two artists to who I was very close to, as Coplans and Wall: did they do anything other than taking pictures? At the same time, they were not photographers, they were really artists who used photography. So "artists who use photography to take photographs" is really the key expression. If you add "against the bad uses of photography" you get the complete formula.
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John Coplans, Interlocking Fingers, No. 11 , 1999
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SC: This idea allows us to rethink the story of the relationship between art and photography from the '900 twenties up to today?
JFC: It must be said above all that for me modern art was born with photography, as I have tried to show in a book, Entre les beaux-arts et les médias. Modern art is located exactly between fine arts and media, and was born with photography in this precise circumstance. This means that we need to go back, well before the twenties, until the nineteenth century, where the story begins with artists-photographers who use the photographic tool to describe a phenomenological and historical reality, such as an extraordinary photographer like Henri Le Secq, able, in a photograph taken after 1850, Au Champ des Cosaques, to represent the place of a Napoleonic battle, a place of memory, showing up close only a stony ground, split and turned, in a way that goes beyound the historical anecdote and the commemoration by creating a very personal relationship, in which psychological interests are not reduced to descriptive ends. We can make similar observations for Roger Fenton, who is perhaps less an artist of Le Secq but who invented, or reinvented, the photographic reportage. There is a fundamental tension, which remains completely current, between my little rule of artists who "use photography to take photographs" and reportage. But this would require a real new theoretical discourse. For example, how does John Coplans' work present a reportage dimension? A priori, in nothing, but the question remains valid.
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JFC: It must be said above all that for me modern art was born with photography, as I have tried to show in a book, Entre les beaux-arts et les médias. Modern art is located exactly between fine arts and media, and was born with photography in this precise circumstance. This means that we need to go back, well before the twenties, until the nineteenth century, where the story begins with artists-photographers who use the photographic tool to describe a phenomenological and historical reality, such as an extraordinary photographer like Henri Le Secq, able, in a photograph taken after 1850, Au Champ des Cosaques, to represent the place of a Napoleonic battle, a place of memory, showing up close only a stony ground, split and turned, in a way that goes beyound the historical anecdote and the commemoration by creating a very personal relationship, in which psychological interests are not reduced to descriptive ends. We can make similar observations for Roger Fenton, who is perhaps less an artist of Le Secq but who invented, or reinvented, the photographic reportage. There is a fundamental tension, which remains completely current, between my little rule of artists who "use photography to take photographs" and reportage. But this would require a real new theoretical discourse. For example, how does John Coplans' work present a reportage dimension? A priori, in nothing, but the question remains valid.
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SC: In the standard narration of modernism, modern art begins with Manet and the rejection of the narration, of the anecdote, of the extrapictory data: the picture becomes autonomous. On the other hand, with respect to this very sclerotic and disputed scheme, I emphasize above all the breakdown value determined by the appearance of photography.
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JFC: For me the beginning of modernity coincides more with Géricault than with Manet, simply because Géricault, painting Le Radeau de la Méduse, is inspired by an anecdotal reality that is already a media reality, before the existence of modern media.It anticipates a phenomenon already well present at the time of Manet.
SC: In the standard narration of modernism, modern art begins with Manet and the rejection of the narration, of the anecdote, of the extrapictory data: the picture becomes autonomous. On the other hand, with respect to this very sclerotic and disputed scheme, I emphasize above all the breakdown value determined by the appearance of photography.
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JFC: For me the beginning of modernity coincides more with Géricault than with Manet, simply because Géricault, painting Le Radeau de la Méduse, is inspired by an anecdotal reality that is already a media reality, before the existence of modern media.It anticipates a phenomenon already well present at the time of Manet.
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SC: On the other hand, it is usually said that only with the exhibition of Walker Evans American Photographs, in 1938 at the MoMA in New York, in turn considered the first museum of "modern" art, the figure of the artist- photographer is definetely affirmed. Do you agree?
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JFC: At that point the games were made long time ago. Walker Evans' exhibition in New York comes at the end of a long story before. The first modern art museum was actually created in Vitebsk in 1918, as seen in the current exhibition at the Center Pompidou (Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch.) The Russian avant-garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922, Center Georges Pompidou , Paris, until July 16th). But it was in Vitebsk, and it closed soon, in 1926. Then there was the Folkwang museum, in Essen, from 1922, then the Muzeum Sztuki of Łódź, opened in 1930. They are at least three examples before the MoMA and all in Europe Central or Eastern Europe, which is a significant fact. The originality of Evans' exhibition at MoMA is that it took place in a modern art museum in a large metropolis of the New World, a museum that has lasted until now. The other decisive element is that the exhibition American Photographs was accompanied by a book, an extraordinary invention, a book of images conceived on the model of the collection of prose poems.
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SC: A real new medium, which will become essential in the subsequent story of photography.
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JFC: Yes, a story that is not closed, but that for some artists does not matter, see the case of Jeff Wall, who has produced forty catalogs but never a book. For him, it is the photographic tableau that is interesting, not the book.
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JFC: At that point the games were made long time ago. Walker Evans' exhibition in New York comes at the end of a long story before. The first modern art museum was actually created in Vitebsk in 1918, as seen in the current exhibition at the Center Pompidou (Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch.) The Russian avant-garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922, Center Georges Pompidou , Paris, until July 16th). But it was in Vitebsk, and it closed soon, in 1926. Then there was the Folkwang museum, in Essen, from 1922, then the Muzeum Sztuki of Łódź, opened in 1930. They are at least three examples before the MoMA and all in Europe Central or Eastern Europe, which is a significant fact. The originality of Evans' exhibition at MoMA is that it took place in a modern art museum in a large metropolis of the New World, a museum that has lasted until now. The other decisive element is that the exhibition American Photographs was accompanied by a book, an extraordinary invention, a book of images conceived on the model of the collection of prose poems.
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SC: A real new medium, which will become essential in the subsequent story of photography.
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JFC: Yes, a story that is not closed, but that for some artists does not matter, see the case of Jeff Wall, who has produced forty catalogs but never a book. For him, it is the photographic tableau that is interesting, not the book.
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SC: Which is the specific jeff's contribution to the story of the use of photography by the artists in your opinion?
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JFC: He reinvented the picture, an extraordinary gesture. I still remember the first time I saw one of his works, in 1995; It was The Thinker, inspired by the engraving of Dürer with the seated figure pierced by the sword. When I discovered this image, I was amazed. Wall did, and still does, photo paintings. It is not the first: in the nineteenth century Le Gray was already doing them, and then the pictorialists made photographic staging. But Wall made them on the basis of painting from the 1940s and 1950s, of his experience with paintings by Pollock, Rothko, etc., linking up with the scale of academic painting and history painting in general. He also made some history paintings, rather parodic and grotesque, but starting from Manet, interpreter of Velázquez, and therefore reducing the painting of history to genre painting.
SC: Which is the specific jeff's contribution to the story of the use of photography by the artists in your opinion?
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JFC: He reinvented the picture, an extraordinary gesture. I still remember the first time I saw one of his works, in 1995; It was The Thinker, inspired by the engraving of Dürer with the seated figure pierced by the sword. When I discovered this image, I was amazed. Wall did, and still does, photo paintings. It is not the first: in the nineteenth century Le Gray was already doing them, and then the pictorialists made photographic staging. But Wall made them on the basis of painting from the 1940s and 1950s, of his experience with paintings by Pollock, Rothko, etc., linking up with the scale of academic painting and history painting in general. He also made some history paintings, rather parodic and grotesque, but starting from Manet, interpreter of Velázquez, and therefore reducing the painting of history to genre painting.
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Raoul Hausmann, Senza titolo (Vera Broido), 1931-33 ca
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SC: The thing that strikes me most in Wall is the tension between the aesthetic of the snapshot and the artificial recreation that exists in his works, in other words the tension between "reality effect" and fiction in the photographic medium. What is your idea about it?
JFC: Wall always claimed to be inspired by things seen, in the sense of Victor Hugo. It is the same scheme, and it is really a historical structure: between beaux-arts and media, on one hand, and reportage on the other, with a tension between its polarities. Artists act within this structure. If we add the hallucination we get a deeper understanding of these phenomena and we avoid always repeating the same words of the American criticism.
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JFC: Wall always claimed to be inspired by things seen, in the sense of Victor Hugo. It is the same scheme, and it is really a historical structure: between beaux-arts and media, on one hand, and reportage on the other, with a tension between its polarities. Artists act within this structure. If we add the hallucination we get a deeper understanding of these phenomena and we avoid always repeating the same words of the American criticism.
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SC: One of the essential "devices" of the modern story is the editing. What is, in your point of view, its role both in the history of the relationship between art and photography and in our actuality?
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JFC: To answer you, I will say first that despite having chosen art history as a discipline, I have always found it difficult to say which is the most important thing for me, between verbal expression and image. The first time I could relate these two interests, literature and images, he was working on the radio. It was a broadcast on photography, it was called Radio-Photo. I played on the fact that there are obviously no images on the radio and there are no sounds in the picture. It happened working on this broadcast that I discovered the montage, relating the language and music of each episode. It is the montage that I constantly practice in my books, in my exhibitions, in my lessons, always. It is a form of association that presents a narrative aspect that can unfold both in time and space. Hence the importance of the notion of interval, which I discovered in the cinema, for example in Vertov. The second thing is that I would never have been able to do art history without working with objects and to do so I moved away from the university world to get closer to the one where objects are made, namely the academies of fine arts. Not only to be close to artists, but to be there where things are made: I belong to those who think that art means making objects. However, the modern artist distrusts objects. I have always been struck by a phrase by Douglas Huebler that basically said: "there are enough objects in the world and it is not worth adding others, what I would like is to produce models". There is in modern art a fundamental negativity of the object, in which the Marxist critique of reification is central. Hence my passion for Duchamp, for Broodthaers, for the line we call conceptual. Therefore, assembly to produce relationships, perhaps models, rather than objects, but also to include objects. I think to do something in agreement with modern art, with that ambivalent attitude of the artist towards the object that says: "Yes, I make objects, I need to make them, it's a way to project myself in the world, but at the same time I do not want to add new ones, I have a reticence, I would like to produce as little as possible, or make sure that each one is unique ", as Duchamp's extraordinary position requires, for which every object can not be repeated. All of this is upstream of all my choices. Practicing the editing with real objects and not only with books, with reproductions, is essential to deal with the ambivalence towards the object.
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SC: The real space of the exhibition, the objects contained in it, also serves to reveal a potential that works can not express if not when they are present materially in an environment ...
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JFC: Certainly. We are faced with a true paradox, which is constitutive of this activity: between the attitude of appropriation or projection and the idea that works must, or can, work alone, without the spectator, and that in a certain sense the spectator is there just to allow them to dialogue with each other, to find their right relationships. The work of organizing an exhibition therefore tends to become almost anonymous. But the paradox is solved if one thinks of the fact that the assembly work requires at the beginning a great knowledge and mastery of the works.
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SC: One of the essential "devices" of the modern story is the editing. What is, in your point of view, its role both in the history of the relationship between art and photography and in our actuality?
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JFC: To answer you, I will say first that despite having chosen art history as a discipline, I have always found it difficult to say which is the most important thing for me, between verbal expression and image. The first time I could relate these two interests, literature and images, he was working on the radio. It was a broadcast on photography, it was called Radio-Photo. I played on the fact that there are obviously no images on the radio and there are no sounds in the picture. It happened working on this broadcast that I discovered the montage, relating the language and music of each episode. It is the montage that I constantly practice in my books, in my exhibitions, in my lessons, always. It is a form of association that presents a narrative aspect that can unfold both in time and space. Hence the importance of the notion of interval, which I discovered in the cinema, for example in Vertov. The second thing is that I would never have been able to do art history without working with objects and to do so I moved away from the university world to get closer to the one where objects are made, namely the academies of fine arts. Not only to be close to artists, but to be there where things are made: I belong to those who think that art means making objects. However, the modern artist distrusts objects. I have always been struck by a phrase by Douglas Huebler that basically said: "there are enough objects in the world and it is not worth adding others, what I would like is to produce models". There is in modern art a fundamental negativity of the object, in which the Marxist critique of reification is central. Hence my passion for Duchamp, for Broodthaers, for the line we call conceptual. Therefore, assembly to produce relationships, perhaps models, rather than objects, but also to include objects. I think to do something in agreement with modern art, with that ambivalent attitude of the artist towards the object that says: "Yes, I make objects, I need to make them, it's a way to project myself in the world, but at the same time I do not want to add new ones, I have a reticence, I would like to produce as little as possible, or make sure that each one is unique ", as Duchamp's extraordinary position requires, for which every object can not be repeated. All of this is upstream of all my choices. Practicing the editing with real objects and not only with books, with reproductions, is essential to deal with the ambivalence towards the object.
.
.
SC: The real space of the exhibition, the objects contained in it, also serves to reveal a potential that works can not express if not when they are present materially in an environment ...
.
JFC: Certainly. We are faced with a true paradox, which is constitutive of this activity: between the attitude of appropriation or projection and the idea that works must, or can, work alone, without the spectator, and that in a certain sense the spectator is there just to allow them to dialogue with each other, to find their right relationships. The work of organizing an exhibition therefore tends to become almost anonymous. But the paradox is solved if one thinks of the fact that the assembly work requires at the beginning a great knowledge and mastery of the works.
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Walker Evans, Cinema, Havana, 1933
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SC: To return to Hausmann, is there not also in his position an implicit critique of a conception of photography as an instrument, we would say today, of the spectacularization of the world?
JFC: There is an ethical dimension, above all. I have always been against aesthetic appropriation, I have always thought that it is necessary to let things, people, exist, trying not to let them enter into an authoritarian way in categories, in speeches, in stories. I always thought that modern art is a constructive, non-authoritarian art, and what interests me is just a non-authoritarian construction, something that I understood by observing the work of Sophie Taeuber. I have an anarchist background that I found in John Coplans and many artists with whom I shared ideas: letting the world exist, not forcing speech, not imposing an interpretation, not bending things in a spectacular way.
JFC: There is an ethical dimension, above all. I have always been against aesthetic appropriation, I have always thought that it is necessary to let things, people, exist, trying not to let them enter into an authoritarian way in categories, in speeches, in stories. I always thought that modern art is a constructive, non-authoritarian art, and what interests me is just a non-authoritarian construction, something that I understood by observing the work of Sophie Taeuber. I have an anarchist background that I found in John Coplans and many artists with whom I shared ideas: letting the world exist, not forcing speech, not imposing an interpretation, not bending things in a spectacular way.
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SC: In this sense, the exhibitions, of photography or other, are not also intrinsically spectacular devices?
JFC: An exhibition is certainly a show but at the same time also an anti-spectacle. It is an impossible paradox to dissolve. But we must try to produce an antispectacular spectacle, in the same way that an artist-photographer must strive to produce images not based on aesthetic appropriation. The idea of non-authoritarian construction is fundamental for me, and I mean non-authoritarian, not "anti-authoritarian". We must always escape the principle of authority.
SC: In this sense, the exhibitions, of photography or other, are not also intrinsically spectacular devices?
JFC: An exhibition is certainly a show but at the same time also an anti-spectacle. It is an impossible paradox to dissolve. But we must try to produce an antispectacular spectacle, in the same way that an artist-photographer must strive to produce images not based on aesthetic appropriation. The idea of non-authoritarian construction is fundamental for me, and I mean non-authoritarian, not "anti-authoritarian". We must always escape the principle of authority.
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