The Jungle of the Esperados

The book may be seen as a montage made from documents produced or found during three random trips taken by Patrick Beaulieu and Daniel Canty, in pursuit of the monarch butterfly (Vecteur monarque, 2007), the wind (Ventury, 2010), and the signs of luck (Vegas, 2012). This publishing venture extends their experiences with audacious and provocative continental crossings by adding the possibility of grasping a fragmentary representation of these voyages in an itinerary that has nothing to do with an explorer’s report, but everything to do with an invitation to a new departure. VVV seems to address readers who may not be born yet, who will find a faded copy on a library shelf and give themselves permission, on the spur of the moment, to slip down these paths… Patrick BeaulieuUne poignée d’ailes, 2015.Photo : courtesy of the artist & Art Mûr, Montréal Patrick BeaulieuMéandre - Yakety Yak, 2014. Photo : courtesy of the artist & Art Mûr, Montréal By shifting from narrative to map, VVV signifies a more profound questioning of the status of the landscape, an indication of a broader contemporary displacement, the meaning of which we must try to understand. In this project, as in all of Beaulieu’s work, landscape is something elliptical. Beaulieu works deliberately with samples collected on the road; his exhibitions usually display his travelling equipment, composed of a relatively modest group of objects. When there is not enough space for him to show the vehicle itself, fragments or evocations in images do the job (rust stains, weathervane, fragments of butterfly wings, wheel of fortune, and so on). The exhibitions devoted to the project titled Meander: A Continental Drift — taking him from the source of a river in southern Québec to the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York — offer an example.The project was presented in 2015 at the Pacific Sky exhibition in Eugene, Oregon, and in 2016 in Montréal at Galerie Art Mûr; in Québec City at Centre Vu Photo as part of the Mois Multi; and in Kamouraska, during the 8e Rencontre photographique. The camping stove and single pot portray the voyage taken aboard Yakety Yak (a handmade cedar kayak) as ascetic. The lengthy geographic route is reduced to a few moments captured with a small camera: slow glides on the river, sparkling water reflected on the surface of a cement vault, the grandiose passage of the frail boat under the Brooklyn Bridge. If we see in our mind’s eye the territory and temporality of the expedition, we think of a North American mythology of friendly vagabonds, moved by the sudden impulse of a cruel joke (such as Kerouac) or the revealing of a defeated expression (Melville’s Ishmael). Gilles Deleuze had unveiled the power of Kerouac’s and Melville’s works to break through the rigid segmentarity that usually determines our lives in order to sketch out vanishing lines.Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “De la supériorité de la littérature anglaise-américaine,” in Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 45 — 91. VVV and Beaulieu’s installations seem to suggest the irreducible nature of experience and confer on the visitor-reader a rather strange status: that of the potential hobo, called upon, from the first pages of the book or the first steps in the gallery space, to desert and sketch out their own line — to vanish. Patrick Beaulieu, Daniel Canty & FEEDroute des vents, 2010.Photo : Alexis Pernet, courtesy of the artist & Art Mûr, Montréal However, these vanishing lines, or “performative trajectories,” As Beaulieu titles his artistic excursions. are not the only things out of bounds in the book or the exhibition. We must consider something else, carefully, for even the hobo settles down from time to time, moves into a “jungle,” attends a “convention.” These are terms used by the hobo Jack Black in his book You Can’t Win, originally published in 1926 and reissued, with an introduction by William S. Burroughs, in 2000 by AK Press/Nabat; it was translated into French (by Jeanne Toulouse) as Yegg (Arles: Les Fondeurs de briques, 2007). The term “jungle” has made a dramatic reappearance in European and Middle Eastern news to designate the self-constructed camps containing thousands of migrants of various geographic and ethnic origins who have converged on the region of Calais, France, at the end of a long journey the initial goal of which was to reach England. What the elegant presentations of images, geo-poetic maps, and artefacts also indicate is the extraordinariness of the voyage, its situation outside of a day-to-day temporality, its capacity to disturb the temporality of others (the inhabitants encountered during the trek). Not everyone allows this to happen: in the stories in VVV, we also notice the existence of a contrarian character who is like the traveller’s absolute negative, his dark matter. This character is the customs agent, the border police officer. As popularized in B movies, spy movies, and crime novels, he tends to be the butt of a joke, the guy you go out of your way to scam or betray. But let’s reason like an ethnographer: in concrete, experienced interactions, this character advances to the prow of a gigantic, hidden apparatus that includes material spaces (boundary markers, border posts), technologies (identification, characterization, and archiving of data on individuals), and regulations (metrological systems, collection of duties, screening and categorization of those claiming passage). And perhaps he is the one who can help us, despite all our aspirations, to define ourselves within the artwork. During Ventury, on November 19, 2010, at the border post of Port Huron, Michigan, Agent Olson (I remember his name because it’s the name of a New England poet) admitted me into the United States as a “tourist.” I don’t know what the agent on the banks of the Missisquoi River wrote in his register when Beaulieu showed up at the Vermont border in a kayak, four years later, during his Meander odyssey, but at any rate he obliged him to stick an official identity card on the inside of his boat, in case he and the boat became separated. He may have registered him as a tourist in the entrance ledger, but it was as a potential drowning victim that he sent him on his way. The label of “tourist” is interesting. We must remember, before reciting the disparaging verse about today’s floods of visitors, that early tourists invented numerous tools that are still very useful. They wrote, drew, and took photographs so that those who followed could share their experience of discovery; they created active networks at every scale to ensure effective forms of action by installing roads, inns, and sites.Catherine Bertho-Lavenir, La roue et le stylo. Comment nous sommes devenus touristes (Paris: Odile Jacob , 1999). If they felt that favoured places were threatened, they invented legal protections, when these did not exist, to protect them. The effects of what was accomplished in the early twentieth century are still visible, as a number of these regulations continue to underlie, for example, nature-protection policies and registration on UNESCO lists. Patrick BeaulieuPoint de confluence - Eastman - Autoroute 10 / jour: 01, 2014, video still.Photo : Alexis Pernet, courtesy of the artist & Art Mûr, Montréal Patrick BeaulieuBlue Rider, 2010.Photo : Alexis Pernet, courtesy of the artist & Art Mûr, Montréal Henry David Thoreau, philosopher and author of Walden, foresaw the need for these measures — now made urgent by the predatory attitudes of Western industrial societies — as he observed, during his excursions on the rivers and lakes of New England (the same ones travelled by Beaulieu a century and a half later), the rapid and implacable clear-cutting of forests in the northeastern United States.See, in particular, Henry David Thoreau, “Chesuncook,” in The Maine Woods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002 ), 84 — 156. It is easy to believe that Thoreau’s descendants are today’s ecology movements; yet, more than a hundred and fifty years have passed since he made his observations. We have understood the charm of his writings late in the day, and for reasons that are still quite troubling. It has taken less than six generations to encircle a number of lakes, located outside of metropolitan corridors, with elegant contiguous abodes, served by imposing roadways, linked to paved routes, to highways, to commercial boulevards. In fact, this urban expansion is not yet fifty years old, even though its genealogy may be traced back over a longer period.Catherine Maumi, Usonia, ou le mythe de la ville-nature américaine (Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2008). Thoreau’s direct heirs are barely beginning to emerge from the shadows in which they were held by modernist narratives associated with the needs of industrial societies and the emergencies engendered by their frequent war-making. These heirs were landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Eliot, and Ian McHarg; Benton MacKaye, forest ranger (one of the founders of the Appalachian Trail); and Lewis Mumford, historian of techniques and civilizations (at first an exegete of nineteenth-century American literature). The discovery of this hidden face of modernity sheds light on the engagement and projects of a different type of contemporary adventurer, those who think of the “planetary garden” (Gilles Clément) or the fragile resources of an inhabited landscape conceived as a “common good” (Alberto Magnaghi). Lighting a spark of resistance and inventiveness, living away from the main media circuits, they are the ones whom Bruno Latour, following Romain Gary, calls the esperados.Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa, huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique (Paris: La Découverte/Les empêcheurs de tourner en rond, 2015), 22. Patrick BeaulieuSocorro – l’insondable, 2013.Photo : Alexis Pernet, courtesy of the artist & Art Mûr, Montréal This is why I do not take offence at the calculated absence of landscape in Beaulieu’s installations. Having spent time with the artist in his jungle (on the shores of the Missisquoi River, around Mount Orford), I find reason to hope in the form of future projects that would reinvent territories and landscapes. The landscape, the deep feeling that we have as we travel the world, the impalpable weight of emotions that take shape and change in each new situation, may be affirmed as one of the powerful engines of Beaulieu’s projects — on condition, perhaps, that they are not made an issue for speculation around reified images, and that furtive means be preferred — those that give the tools for action to those who need them most. These new projects will no longer use the promethean tools associated with established forms of engineering, but will think in terms of ecosystems (jungles within which to hope), bringing together minimal vital functions and poetic organs in a single grouping. Their representation is taking a long time to form, to result in a defined image. But perhaps it is now being clarified beyond images, and instead within networks that gain in efficiency what they lose in visibility. The landscapes that are being created would thus embody the paradox of existing only in experience in order to evade the logics of depletion that have affected previous representations. Magnified and arranged in museums, or reproduced ad nauseam, today these representations are loved only in (dis)proportion to what has become of their physical sites, their places of reference, which were once worthy of emotion, simply alive. The jungle of esperados is a landscape both inhabited and aspired to (thus, a project) that is revealed only through a measured set of clues or blurred maps: better than a voyage to a distant land, another poetic exploration of the here. Translated from the French by Käthe Roth Alexis Pernet, Patrick Beaulieu

The Jungle of the Esperados

Suggested Reading

Ma loi, mon nouvel emblème, la société des writers graffeurs

Sketchy Machines: Propositions Around Three Robotic Artworks