Resisting Descartes (1996)

My frivolity, discreet in the 1950s and 1960s, established in the 1970s and 1980s, and triumphant today, thought it was safe from all danger. But there now appears to be a subtle attempt at philosophically explaining my works. It is coming from the North, from the country without which the history of philosophy would be really too lightweight. Yes, I have to admit it, in the 1950s I was tempted by the euphoric post-Cartesian rationalism of the worshippers of progress and of uncompromising geometry. From this time in my life, I have always kept a great faith in logic, systems, precision, and geometry. So why should I not feel today like a modest inheritor of Descartes and, in particular, of the Discourse on the Method? Why not feel that way, if we keep to the (shortened) title? I have nothing against discourse, and I love method. Valéry gave a definition of method that I find delightful: “To seek a method is to seek a system of exteriorizable operations that function better than the mind, the work of the mind” (Variety). 

           But the point is that Descartes’s work is not just an apology for the “Method,” and the Discourse on the Method is a mutilated title that, in actual fact, continues with the words of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. I really have no desire to rightly conduct my reason, nor to seek truth, and still less to prove the existence of God (third part of the Discourse). 

           My own epoch and unbeliefs are no longer those of Descartes. Furthermore, the noun raison has produced two adjectives in French: the respectable rationnel and the very reactionary raisonnable that mixes up common sense, moderation, and normality. The German language is fortunate to have avoided this perversion that affects most of the European languages. So, yes, for more than forty years now, I have had an unbroken attachment to systems, precision, and, in fact, to everything that would restrict on my subjective decisions: constraints, chance (programmed), geometric figures, black and white, etc. This has allowed me to keep my distance not only from my own moods, dramas, and fantasies, but also from certain flattering picnic baskets of art historians. 

           It is very tempting, and it soothes the conscience, to find (a posteriori) prestigious explanations in ancient history, and equally so in the contemporary world. I myself have not always been able to resist this temptation.

— In the 1940s, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (in particular Oceanic art, and the tapa cloths especially) justified and reinforced my taste for a certain geometric simplification. I thus came to the conclusion that Western art had ceased to be of interest, and that the secrets of art were in other hands (those of the “primitives” and my own). 

— At the beginning of the 1950s, I was able to find in “Gestalt theory” and in “Concrete art” some solid justifications for my systematic geometry. A little later, with my friends François and Vera Molnàr, we thought we had found something better in the new “information theory.” We endeavored to create experimental works that would serve a new science of art. At any rate, our form of art, with, among other things, its confidence in reason and progress and with its challenge to individualism, seemed to us (with all due respect to Zhdanov) to fit the desires of the true Marxists.

— The 1960s, the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel years, were completely devoted to the participation of the viewer. Play was finally giving a social dimension to our geometry.

— Following this, in the 1960s, I gave in twice to the temptation to explain. In the beginning, with my theory of the picnic basket (which Duchamp, moreover, had sketched well before me in a famous interview), I was able to find an honorable rationale behind the meaninglessness of my geometries: if my works had nothing to say, it was in order to encourage the viewers to make them speak, to give to the works themselves a meaning that would belong to the works. 

— Then came the ultimate revelation. Thanks to the philosopher Clément Rosset and his book L’anti-nature, my taste for precision and my abstraction became philosophically correct.

Subsequently, I have resisted Zen as much as Baudrillard, and Chaos as much as Fractals, all of which, I am told, would have suited me. And I shall resist Descartes as well. This is because my method is frivolous and not Cartesian. The systems it uses do not lead to truth but rather to lies, or, more exactly, to “pseudos”: pseudo-Impressionism, pseudo-Expressionism, pseudo-Transcendentalism, pseudo-pornography, etc., and, I was about to forget, pseudo-Cartesianism.