Being Brief

A lesson in lightness, or civility, a hint of an old way of life (as suggested by the faintness of the etching and ink). Still, the child thought, you need a long scarf, skates, and gloves. I can hear Verlaine’s song: He skated marvellously… And the last lines barely whispered: Sometimes he seemed to stay out of sight, Pure velocity in full flight Towards a target out of sight… The skater disappears; the mist is faint; the line, suspended. Brevity is a rare gift, ruled by a kind of magic. One word more, one word less… the spell is broken. Gilbert DupuisImage from the book P.S. par G.D., Rennes, Éditions Incertain Sens / FRAC Bretagne / Les Carnets de l’atelier, 2001.Photo : © Gilbert Dupuis Held in suspension by its slowly fading echo, the last syllable lingers in the air, invisible, irregular, drawing out the last sound of the phrase. The sound leaves a long trail that dissolves at the end of the rhymes. It retains what has just been voiced and prolongs its trace. And grace. For being brief does not mean being sharp. Or authoritarian. The authority belongs to the author, auctor. Once the task is done, put a final period, step back and say, “There it is, there’s the work.” Such is the author’s authority — define, cut off, prohibit — supported by a battery of written and oral laws enumerating the author’s rights. For a long time, art made use of a defensive virtuous circle: untouchable, unassailable, unrepeatable, the work was placed there once and for all. Period. The conceptualization — or rather, more simply, the concept — of the finished work comes from the definition of “act,” which, according to Aristotle, is the realization of the possibilities present in the materials. Raw wood can therefore be said to hold the possibility of a statue, and the statue, once emerged from the state of formless material, is its perfect completion, or, to be frank and pedantic to the very end, its entelechy. The possible taken to its realization, or to the end of the action that reveals its ultimate end. THE UNFINISHED STYLE This well-oiled apparatus that separates material from form, possibility from entelechy, desired end from realized end, showed its limitations well before the unfinished became the bible of modern and then contemporary art. Art enthusiasts, hobbyists, and cryptologists would look for and often find notebooks, notepads, plans, drafts, and sketches that went with the “finished” works. These discoveries would offer a unique pleasure: a fellowship and familiarity with the works whose uncertain outcomes the readers, listeners, and viewers could then share. Beyond the criticism of museums, in the era of doubts and “ifs,” of relinquishing certainties and developing interest in the work in process, the world of aesthetics has shifted toward praising the unfinished work, which it paradoxically raises to the status of fully fledged work — that is, “finished,” museum-ready. Yet regardless of the contradictions, the latest style prevails, and the non finito style becomes the artistic standard. Destiny or Decision Nonetheless, there are many ways of practising the non finito, two of which can be easily recognized. The first indicates an interruption (accident, death, loss) and leaves incomplete a work intended to be completed. Leonardo da Vinci is one example: he abandoned The Adoration of the Magi and several sketches that were not “coloured in.” His famous sfumato plays on the ambiguity between a trans-material vision (the blurry distance as deliberately not “finished”) and simple incompletion due to apathy. The second asserts the non finito as such in works that are not only realized but, more importantly, exemplary of the non finito style. Rodin’s Balzac bound in his robe of uncut stone and The Thinker’s hand barely emerging from the material: these works show the struggle and the triumph of form over material. Author — OmitterIn his book L’Inachevé,Claude Lorin coined the term ôteur (from the verb ôter —to remove) as a homonym of the term auteur (author) to denote the idea of omission implicit in any aesthetic creation. (Trans.) Works situated in the “minor” style of preparatory sketches, of marginal, occasional, and travel drawings have a more nuanced relationship with the non finito. The same is true for poetry, the natural mode of which is suspension, but also for essays, which are by definition “open-ended.” There is room for interpretation: the unfinished allows readers and viewers to use their imagination, gives them their own creative part to play. Making their audience imagine has always been true for realized works, but with the new aesthetic standard of the unfinished, openness becomes an obligation — or, at the very least, an implicit rule, an “aesthetic correctness” all the more absolute because it is unspoken. On Stopping One must either stop before the “end” or omit that end. The key is knowing where the end is and what sort of end it is; does it depend on a desired end or is it entirely uncertain? In this case, choosing where to stop is not easy; controlled randomness, like the recomposed readymade, is a perilous exercise. John Cage sometimes fails in his roll of the dice, and the games between open and closed — such as “the gallery will be closed for the duration of the exhibition” — end up being tiresome. All kinds of non finito practices are used, all kinds of stops tested, launched, withdrawn, discussed. The non finito never ends not ending. From failure — “I’d better stop here” (yet keeping a record of it with the idea of “taking it up again” one day) — to the cavalier attitude of the abandoned line, (so-called) “unimportant”; from bizarre inventions that will never get to the end (but what is the end of an invention?) — writing footnotes for a nonexistent text or using the intellectual constraints of Oulipo — to the ultimate sacrifice granted to the non finito (leaving works without title or signature, as though abandoned),… or even destroyed. In Destructions, a short, “unimportant” book, Eric Watier catalogues ninety-nine works that were destroyed by their authors. Eric Watier, L’inventaire des destructions (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2012). Pierre Soulages gave a page from one of his manuscripts to Gilbert Dupuis to do whatever he wanted with it. Gilbert Dupuis, P.S. par G.D. (Rennes: Éditions Incertain Sens / FRAC Bretagne / Les Carnets de l’atelier, 2001). the peculiarities abound. Impossible to follow all the twists and turns. All that remains is to sketch the posture expressed in the non finito; to attempt a grammar of the brief, a lexicon, and even a philosophy. Gilbert DupuisImage from the book P.S. par G.D., Rennes, Éditions Incertain Sens / FRAC Bretagne / Les Carnets de l’atelier, 2001.Photo : © Gilbert Dupuis THE BRIEF POSTURE The non finito, the unfinished, is not exclusive to the visual arts, sculpture, and painting; writing also combines form and content, genre constraints, echoes of rhythms and sounds. Poetry is the quintessence of the unfinished, allowing the sounds to hover and glide like the train of a wedding dress. Postures, gestures, and poses also bear an essential non finito; dance draws its grace from the unfamiliar suspensions of bodies released from their weight, “nesting in the air.” The barest smile, therefore, is a kind of reserved act, stopped before its “end”; it belongs to the family of “brevities,” traces of actions that have not yet happened. Do we actually think that Mona Lisa is about to laugh? The hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth immediately dissuades us. We already know that she will not go all the way to the end, that she will stop at this delicate stretching of the lips, leaving the last word unsaid. No mystery here. It’s simply the “brief posture” of a dandy. Why “dandy”? The image we usually have of a dandy is that of a man — women are rarely or never associated with dandyismSee Françoise Coblence, Le dandysme, Obligation d’incertitude (Paris: PUF, 1998), introduction to the second edition. — impeccably dressed in the latest style but not overdone, stylish beyond style, with nothing to add or eliminate. Taste, wit, at times impertinence and insolence, a kind of “untouchability” very close to “Glide, mortals, but tread not heavily,” the rough sketch or hint, slipperiness, evasion, and elision are attributes of the dandy posture and provide a concrete example of brevity. As a sketch of what the sketch could be, evoking the enigmatic figure of the dandy seems appropriate. Might the obligation of uncertainty — which is key to dandyism, according to Françoise Coblence — find its practical application in the non finito standard of contemporary art? Or the “sketch” as the practical form of a philosophy of our time. The brief posture is a way of approaching life. Life as merely possible, uncertain, discontinuous, roughly sketched, not museum-ready, remote. A kind of ataraxia, an indifference to the expression of emotions, their subtle reserve, a lack of concern for the consequences — the sketch or hint (drawing or gesture) is dropped — “not important” is its conclusion; the impersonal, the neutral, and the modest mingle with arrogance. Discontinuity is its logic, offering “the possibility of an impervious passion,”Nicolas Pesquès, La face nord de Juliau, sept (Marseille: André Dimanche, 2010). a wonderful expression at which, briefly and without explanation, I will stop this article. Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei Gilbert Dupuis, Laurent Beaudoin

Being Brief

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