Some aesthetics take it as read that art is determined by its message, by the discourse it
articulates about the world. This, runs the theory, is its one and only raison d'être. In its various forms,
whether figurative or abstract, modern or purportedly postmodern, expressionism has accredited the
commonplace of the artist as someone with a sovereign faculty for saying, for saying the truth even, the
whole truth. However, on several occasions since the heroic age of the avant-gardes this expressionist
optimism has been made to look pretty shallow by exactly the kind of tragedies it claimed could ward
off. One result has been a loss of the ability to identify the respective and contradictory meanings of art
and the world. Magic and the theatre have repeatedly filled the void for those who were unable or
unwilling to give up the declamatory function of art. Magic makes it possible to short-circuit the rules of
art and postulate the beyond as something already given or, at worst, immanent. In contrast, the theatre
offers an illusory dialogue between author and spectator by mimicking the conditions of a here and now
that is as absolute as it is ephemeral. This capacity to enable a theurgic or profane action, in a negating
mode as well as a positive one, has been one of the major utopias of modernity.
With the “Lucrèce” series (1983), Jan Vercruysse emblematically stated an irrevocable break with
the idea that art can pronounce a discourse, or that it can speak in accordance with
rules that do not belong to it. The silence of Lucrece, gained at the cost of the most extreme act, suicide,
gave way to the exigency of a mute eloquence. Exit the actor’s body: the “Chambres”, the TOMBEAUX, and
the “Suites” insistently register this effect of absence, delve into it as if in an infinite and vertiginous play
of one-way mirrors. And while a few elements of the setting remain, along with the lingering sensation of
a stage, it nevertheless goes without saying that this stage will always be empty now, and that no God or
poet, no prophet or buffoon, will ever make pronouncements from it or perform any kind of action there.
The “Atopies” are like the involution of all scenes, leading ultimately to their dissolution in a place that
shuts out any imaginings. Vercruysse’s stage is the sign of theatre’s disappearance.
It would be much too easy a mistake to judge that nothing remains, that the silence is an effect of
nihilism, that death is the end of all things. The death of an actor has never caused the end of the world,
or condemned its inhabitants to eternal procrastination. On the contrary, when the words of discourse dry
up, their place is taken by another regime of the word, of speech, and silence becomes as eloquent as it can
be before or after what we agree to call life.
Jan Vercruysse’s oeuvre is engaged in exactly this ordeal of substitution, and it is on this count that it will
experience the work of the negative, on this count too that it brings into play contradictions that authorise
another horizon where the word may manifest itself. His work is much more about perceiving the lines of
this horizon than about seeing and contemplating the process that made it possible.
Vercruysse’s use of photography is significant in this respect. He has never sought to reproduce the
real, let alone to capture the effects of time and the play of light or delight in a miraculously preserved
impression – the usual occupation of artistic and journalistic photographers alike. In the “Sans Titre
(Autoportraits)’’ (1979), “Portrait de l’Artiste’’ (1982), “Personnages’’ (1983) or the “Portrait de l’Artiste par
lui-même” (1984), among other series from the same period, photography was reduced to a mechanism; it
was merely one instrument of the image, a simple functionality. In other words, rejected as a specific technique and discipline, photography provided no aesthetic or ideological frame for what happened in the
mental image that it was its task – and its only task – to recreate. In a sense, it was a non-event that made
it possible to bring out of the darkness and into the light the artificiality of the rhetoric that was the prime
constituent of these works. Inanimate figures, locked into their poses, allegorical accessories, masks, misesen-abyme – the divergence between the visible and that which it gives us to think was manifest in these
works in a melancholic or an ironic form. We find the same characteristics and the same demarcations in
the recent series.
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“A Voyage’’ (2002) and “In My Mind’’ (2003) are ‘lost’ stagings (in the same way as we speak of the
‘lost wax’ process) of female figures who are subjected to the power of the image of a time that is without
the slightest actuality, a time that cannot be identified in accordance with the rules of life or grammar. A
time – and this is perhaps what distinguishes melancholy from nostalgia – that is always gone and also still
to come. In different ways in each series, these figures are unable to become the subjects of the images; they
cannot be apprehended in their singularity. Like toys or bits of furniture, they appear as objects, prone to
the same absence, each doomed to comparable symbolic conditions. Again here, the image has always preexisted its photographic rendering.
In the “Camera Oscura’’ series, however, Vercruysse plays deliberately on the reality of the photographic process. Here, using the eponymous technique, the world is echoed, upside down, through a pinhole. Each work is a diptych with, on the left, the ‘normal’ image (i.e., as ‘corrected’ during development)
of a figure (a Josephine, an Alice, a menina, a harlequin, a man with a bottle rack…) and, on the right, the
‘upside down’ (i.e., ‘original’) camera obscura image. By feigning ignorance (the very definition of irony),
the “Camera Oscura” pieces turn these figures from the repertoire into those very specific objects known
since the beginnings of time as puppets. Marionnette in French, Puppe in German, burattino or fantoccino in Italian, ningyojoruri in Japanese, wayang golek in Javanese – this universal figure not only defies gravity but is independent of the ground on which it supposedly moves and acts. It obeys none of the strict
rules of realism but instead enables another space-time that is valid only for itself, and where it reigns
supreme. In Vercruysse’s diptychs these puppets undercut the photographic illusion, just like the upsidedown trees of Rodney Graham's to which they seem to respond with, if anything, an additional vigilance.
They also introduce the possibility of another order of images, one which diverges significantly from the
question of photography.
In one of his most seminal texts, On the Puppet Theatre (1810), Heinrich von Kleist, who often
brings such unacceptable truths before us, puts the description of puppets in the mouth of a perceptive
dancer, who says that they understand gravity according to their own nature, that they “need the ground
only in order to brush over it”, that they have the undeniable merit of “not putting on airs”. The puppet’s
matchless grace is “like the image in a concave mirror [that] after being infinitely distant, reappears just in
front of us”. In other words, and this is the narrator’s conclusion, “we need to eat once again of the Tree of
Knowledge if we are to return to the state of innocence.”
Experts in the art of the true and the false, capable of minimising that which makes them exist, the
puppets of the “Camera Oscura” inhabit an infinity that we thought beyond them. They have every right
to turn us upside down when facing the image. And, apparently without lifting a finger, they open up a space
where we are lost for words. The puppet, wrote Paul Claudel, “is not an actor who speaks, it is a word that
acts.”
Alain Cueff
Translated by Charles Penwarden
Jan Vercruysse, Elise ti voglio parlare, Tucci Russo Studio per l’arte contemporanea, Torre Pellice, 2003.
All ©.
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