Answers to Questions from Sonja Klee (2006)

I’ve just now read all your questions, dear Sonja, and realize I will need to clarify a number of points that are almost as hazy for me as they are for you. Forgive me, but I’m not going to answer your questions very systematically, but rather a bit willy-nilly. 

           First of all, what meaning do the key words “irony,” “humor” and along with it “jubilation,” and “generosity” have for me? I will begin by quoting a phrase from Stendhal, who, though French, showed a great appreciation for the Italians, who are implicitly implicated therein:

           The French, for whom the pleasure of demonstrating irony snuffs out the happiness of having enthusiasm.

I agree with Stendhal, not that I agree with his enthusiasm for enthusiasm itself, which it seems to me has served the worst dictatorships—those absolutisms that irony has, perhaps, helped us avoid. I’m dreaming, no doubt! But I have never really admired or cultivated this especially French brand of irony. Irony is so often turned against others, whom we ridicule and abase in order to feel better about ourselves. It is heroic when used by the oppressed against their aggressors, and detestable the other way around. 

           In fact, I would have no problem with keeping the beginning of the quote but changing “snuffs out the happiness of enthusiasm” to “blinds us to the benefits of humor.” Humor, for its part, is aggressive only toward “common sense,” and its benefits are many: it can soothe pain, seriousness, credulity, arrogance, simply by absorbing them. It creates a world similar and parallel to reality, but inverted and absurd. I like to imagine that, much like those famous black holes out there in the universe, there are black humor holes, where the antimatter of laughter is to be found. This humor can treat the ennui of the English aristocrat just as well as the anguish of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. And yet it is not truly universal. It exasperates the engaged, the faithful, and the serious. Dictators do not tolerate it (so far). It can provoke laughter, but in its finest moments it creates long jubilations rather than quick flurries of laughter. I feel it is present at all times in my work, although some people, no doubt, never see it. Starting in 1952, a certain affinity for emptiness drove me to go beyond the rigor of “Concrete art” by producing uniform distributions. Then, in 1958, still with the aim of distancing myself from my works, I began using random systems. Well, this attitude, without any metaphysical or transcendental justification, seems to me to respond to a certain penchant for the absurd—to something that may resemble the beginnings of a serene kind of humor.

           At the time, of course, I made frequent reference to “Concrete art” and to Max Bill, who is not much of a specialist of humor. But what really excited me about Concrete art was the part that sought to abolish subjective decisions. In Western art, before the twentieth century, works were the fruit of thousands, even millions of subjective decisions. In the twentieth century, the works of Malevich or Mondrian reduced that number to no more than a hundred or so, surely; and then later, Bill’s 1946 work Weisses Quadrat), which is a regular distribution of eighty-one squares, or eighty black squares and one white square, left even fewer; and finally, in my homage for Max Bill’s seventieth birthday, where I revisited his 1946 painting but all eighty-one squares were black, I got it all the way down, according to my calculations, to eleven subjective decisions. 

           Yes, my “ironically formal” definition, which I had forgotten, suits quite a lot of these minimalist works from the 1950s. Then the discrete “formally ironic” works would be the ones where chance “apes” the inspired artist; and finally, the somewhat more heavy-handed formally ironic works would be “bonbons, flash, klaxon,” the “reflections in water,” and the “cul, con, non, nul” that you enjoy. All these works are from the GRAV era and are, of course, fruits of the emulation and joyful one-upmanship that energized us.

           Come to think of it, “viewer participation,” so dear to GRAV, was also another way of distancing oneself from the work, one that was a bit more brutal and even sometimes a bit heavier than that created through the use of chance.

           Your questions, stirring up my memories, are leading me little by little to think that what I was reacting against most, what vexed me most (and for that matter still does), was not the collectors, the galleries, the critics, or grand religious or political ideas; no, it was those artists, or more precisely the behavior of certain artists from my era, who were roundly in the majority. I have, by the way, found a passage from my 1971 text, “From Viewer to Viewer, or the Art of Unpacking One’s Picnic,” which will explain to you in a better manner what I thought and still think today, but in a less serious and moralizing way.

When a politician, a scientist, an artist, etc., allows people to believe that what he is or what he does is of a nature that is different from what the “vulgar” public is or does. For me, this is the greatest crime against intelligence and progress; it is always a step backward in the direction of the past (toward the worst of the past). I think that those artists who, voluntarily or otherwise, cultivate the arbitrary, who lead us to believe in secret justifications, and who play the role of hidden despots, all the while seeing themselves as artistic revolutionaries, are dangerous reactionaries.

Yes, this is why I have sympathized with movements that were reactions against that image of the inspired, genius artist—Concrete art, for instance, or that quest for a science of art that was dear to François Molnàr, or even on the contrary the cool Dadaism of Duchamp, Picabia, or Filliou. 

           When you ask what the idea of freedom means to me with respect to the arts, well, I believe that, in our Western democracies, the greatest enemies of that cherished freedom are those artists who are serious, pontificating, professorial, authoritarian, even after they themselves gained their initial celebrity from their own refusal of the established rules. Artists who will be helped and surpassed by their supporters, of course. 

           So, did my taste for distancing myself from the work, the detachment I had cherished since 1952 take on a sufficient dose of derision to earn the name of humor? It’s hard to say! 

           It is true that frivolity and humor were regarded poorly not only by Hegel, but also by the dominant intelligentsia of the postwar French left. Indifference was a reactionary, even fascist attitude. 

Let us return to my titles. They are important to me because they are there first and foremost as a reminder that one must not take too seriously what lies beneath them; and then, at certain times, their grotesque construction constitutes an equivalent of what is happening in the work, such as Géométree, Steel Life, Free-Vols, Géométrie dans les spasmes, etc. For me, in the last third of the twentieth century, “Concrete art,” along with poetry, architecture, advertising, politics, eroticism, etc., had to call on irony if it wished to be consumed in our decadent West (the adjective “decadent” having been invented by the barbaric to designate the civilized). But it is true that historians of art often continue to think that if by some chance there exist masterpieces that are “funny,” it is in spite of their “funniness” that they are masterpieces.

           As for me, I give thanks, for instance and in no particular order, to the Marx Brothers, to Alphonse Allais, to the late Baroque of southern Germany, to Picabia, Filliou, Armleder, Lavier, Raymond Devos, and many others… who have made me laugh. 

           Now, looking back over your questions, I find, of course, some I still have not answered.

           For instance, do I think that, without the titles and the self-commentary, an uninitiated public would find humor in some of my works? Of course not! My works are not meant for a large uninitiated audience. They are made for complicit spectators—those who are not always in agreement, but who are nonetheless in on the game. As for the “farces” I appreciate in the work of others, there is no need, in principle, for the spectator to be initiated. I have in no way dreamed, not for a long time, of a large popular following.

           Another question: which works influenced me and encouraged me to mix Concrete art, or at least geometry and humor. Stirring up my vague memories once again, I find three sources, which I will list chronologically by when they appeared to me. First of all, the very geometric and joyful, but also of course somewhat figurative, works that Picasso made in 1946 in Antibes; then above all the many marvelous pieces of your namesake, Paul Klee. Finally, the work of Sophie Taeuber, an exemplary artist in many respects, especially for the happy marriage she forged between Switzerland and Dada, and between herself and Hans Arp. There are of course her own works, bright and joyous, whose titles are often ironic, such as Flottant, aligné, oscillant, écartant, soutenant (1932) or Six espaces aux teintes ensoleillées (1938). But it is the pieces she made in 1918 with Arp, the “duo collages,” that really profoundly influenced me: these squares or rectangles cut with a paper cutter and pasted back together at random, which also influenced Ellsworth Kelly during his time in Paris.

           I enclose a Paul Klee filled with geometry and humor, and a quote from Cioran that I discovered yesterday and that delighted me:

           Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits… When we refuse to admit the interchangeable character of ideas, blood flows… Look around you; everywhere, specters preaching; each institution translates a mission… We mistrust the swindler, the trickster, the con man; yet to them we can impute none of history’s great convulsions… to them humanity owes the few moments of prosperity it has known…

           The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster… The great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs not quite beheaded…

           From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions.¹

¹ E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (New York:Arcade Publishing, 2012), pp. 3–6.