Flawless Fragility
This issue is published in continuity with the themes of “Mutual Actions” and “Waste” that were previously explored in our publication. The current theme of “Fragile” allows us to examine how art’s various parameters, materials, apparatuses and production modes, even the figure of the artist itself, have been weakened. Contributors have answered our invitation in the same spirit and have expanded their consideration of the fragile in physical terms—the friability of the object or the fleetingness of the artwork and, subsequently, their modes of conservation—to its various ontological underpinnings. Fragility thus finds its way in an essay on the sublime and the aesthetics of inadequacy where photographic still lifes are paralleled with the Renaissance vanitas (Falvey), while another essay opposes individual singularity (and, by extension, fragility) to the notion of plasticity, with a particular emphasis on attempts to go beyond matter (glass and plastic) “to reveal its ‘spirit,’ that is, its cultural and civilizational import” (Poulin).
Numerous analytical avenues are based on works dealing directly or indirectly with fragility. We’ve noticed that writers in this issue have been particularly driven by the artworks, by their delicate aspect, precarious presentation or symbolic materials and subjects. The fleetingness of Chih-Chien Wang and Joanne Poitras’s installations, the figurative import of sugar in Aude Moreau’s work, Patrick Beaulieu’s immaterial projects and Sophie Calle’s intimist approach have all offered a solid basis for the formulation of various theories and contributed to striking a balance between the work and its analysis, which certainly adds to the strength of this issue.
The works brought together in the portfolio section also reveal how diverse the perception of fragility is in art. Here too, we must take into consideration the materials used, such as glass, porcelain, ice and ashes. But beyond their risk of being broken, the works reproduced ask us to contemplate life’s impermanence, our fragile relationship to the other, to disappearance, loss or death. Thus, the breakable leads to the precarious, the tactile to the evanescent, the material to the spiritual.
In choosing this theme, we hoped to elicit thoughts that would go beyond artistic fragility and address, among others, human fragility. We certainly did not anticipate having such a close experience with death. We would have preferred watching it from afar, simply evoking its role as an essential source of inspiration in art and literature. It turned out otherwise. The untimely death of a colleague and friend, artist, writer and curator Patrice Duhamel, has confronted us abruptly, violently, with our fragility as human beings. In an unpublished text entitled “Les seuils de l’inquiétude” [The Thresholds of Restlessness], Patrice wrote: “I’m listening because I’m a restless subject in a state of alert. It’s already a sort of suspense. I’m trying to understand the place that’s been given to me, the place I occupy in this world. I’m listening because I want to decipher, because in so doing I ‘gather’ and I ‘read’ according to the etymology of this word, and so I record. I’m listening because, as wrote Roland Barthes, I’m also saying, imperatively, ‘listen to me.’” The greatest tribute that we could pay this artist who was active in every aspect of art will certainly be to “listen” to him through his work and to continue to disseminate his voice. So we’ve invited Jean-Pierre Vidal, who wrote a brilliant piece on a Patrice Duhamel exhibition in issue no. 51 of esse, to take a fresh look at his recent work, as beautiful and rich as what preceded it. We hope that these few pages will contribute to keep Patrice Duhamel’s work alive in our collective memory.
[Translated from the French by Colette Tougas]
