Bernar Venet: The Re-Write
John Perreault
Photograph by George Veron
At last, the mystery of Bernar Venet is solved. Well, sort of. As with all good detective stories the solution (like the eponymous epistle in Poe?s Purloined Letter) was in plain sight all along.
Venet, born in France in 1941, is a pioneer conceptual artist, whose key works in this line were completed in New York from 1966 to 1970. He now refers to this as his "so-called conceptual period." He stopped making art in 1970, an event sealed the next year by an exhibition at the New York Cultural Center–in the famous Edward Durell Stone building on Columbus Circle, soon, alas, to have a Museum of Arts and Design make-over.
Venet was all of 29.
That Venet ceased making art might not be much of a mystery. Conceptual Art, as even Venet now admits, was a rather narrow practice. I’d agree but add that this was particularly true of Venet’s Cartesian brand of conceptualism. Besides, many artists, after some initial success or notoriety, stop and wander away or pretend to. The best example being Marcel Duchamp, who let it be thought he had turned his back on art after completing The Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelors, Even, but secretly (and not so secretly) continuing to strew art here and there, while working on his posthumously revealed version of Suzanne and the Elders.
The Venet mystery is compounded by the fact that six years after "giving up art," he reappears as a full-fledged sculptor, making big, linear sculptures out of cold-rolled steel.
I rather like the originality of Venet’s unorthodox career caesura but first we need to pin down exactly why the artist stopped making conceptual art. And then his re-emergence. What explains the five-year gap and the change? How does he rationalize the change of his work from idea to object?
Context Is All
When Venet’s new book, Art: A Matter of Context (Hand Press Editions) fell into my hands I thought I’d have all the clues in one place.
I had other resources, too. I happen to have in my personal library Venet’s 1971 New York Cultural Center catalogue called, A Catalogue Raisonne, apparently because it listed 341 works made from 1966 through 1970. Donald Kashan’s introduction stipulates 337 works. He quotes Venet saying: "I was an artist for one day."
Clearly, this means that Venet was only an artist when he came up with the idea of making economics, meteorology, science, and then mathematics his subjects and his form. Or, as he later said: "I did not present mathematics as art; but mathematics as such." The rest was just filling in the blanks. And then he was done.
Here is Venet’s scheme:
1967: Astrophysics, Nuclear Physics, Space Sciences.
1968: Mathematics by Computation, Meteorology, Stock Market
1969: Meta-Mathematics, Psychophysics and Psychochronometry,
Sociology and Politics.
1970: Mathematical Logic.
The art took the form of handmade inscriptions on canvas and paper of various charts, diagrams, and texts, but the photo-blow-ups were best because Venet didn’t even have to touch the stuff. For performances he hired specialists to lecture on their areas of expertise, often simultaneously. He even sent subscriptions of The Wall Street Journal to 50 people.
I should also mention that he did not even choose his "subjects" but for the most part relied upon consultants in the various fields.
Pursuing the catalog and other sources at hand, I was reminded that the good thing about the artist’s early conceptual works was that they did not look good. They were not even interesting; they were serious. In retrospect, they were original in a way that a lot of conceptual art was not.
He stopped. He changed. Artists are permitted to change. And, as Venet now seems to realize, attractiveness is how art pays its way. I will not say "beauty" because it is still a loaded word. Just remember that I am not the first to point out that for all of their conceptual rigor, Duchamp’s Readymades look pretty good.
The Text Is All
Here is what I learned from Venet’s new book and why I recommend it for every art library:
Various essays by art critics, as reprinted in Art: A Matter of Context, agree that the young Venet took Roland Barthes seriously. Venet was trying to achieve a zero degree of expressivity and to eliminate the author of the artwork. From a larger, but perhaps exclusively visual arts perspective, in Venet’s case this also has to do with the general anti-expressionist turn, best exemplified by minimalism. He, like other conceptual artists, took minimalism one step further. In effect, the Oedipus who did away with Abstract Expressionism in turn gets bumped off by conceptualist progeny–the blind killing the blind. Reducing art to objecthood was superceded by reducing art to idea or specifically "language."
The New York Cultural Center exhibition did not include, as Christian Besson points out in his dense essay, any mention of pre-New York work. In Nice, the Venet we now know did tar paintings, painted cardboard works, piles of coal, and even photos of himself bare-chested lying on garbage. Besson also points out how Venet, in publication after publication and interview after interview, has been engaged in a process of what I would call re-writing himself. But this is what all artists do if given the chance.
Like other artists in the conceptual art milieu Venet made language rather than form the vehicle and the subject of his art. Joseph Kosuth stood his ground with philosophy. Venet claimed economics, science, math. Others like Robert Barry, Douglas Heubler and Lawrence Weiner, although they would deny it, had a more poetic bent. Now that conceptual art is being re-evaluated, it might be illuminating to compare their words to the one word poems of Aram Saroyan that were also in circulation at the time.
Vis a vis, what might now lovingly be called the Yoko Ono branch of conceptual art, critic Lawrence Alloway–who was always sharp and to the point–in his introduction to the catalogue to Venet’s 1976 exhibition at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, correctly points out that you will not find any headlines or haiku or aphorisms in Venet’s art.
The problem with what I would call High Conceptualism (we could include here early Art & Language and, of course, Kosuth) is a little more serious than the Sisyphisian but apparently perennial need to separate poetry and art, wondering which is the contaminant of which.
Once a long time ago poetry tried to swallow painting. Or, was it vice versa?
Then philosophy tried to swallow art and gave up.
More recently art tried to swallow philosophy and mathematics. This was not wrong because disciplines need to be distinct–just you try–but because it is like trying to put a glove on a foot, or conversely, using a shoe as a glove. In terms of the former, the glove won’t fit unless you have gigantic hands. In terms of the latter, all you get is a very bad mitten.
We can now, however, think of art’s use of philosophy (Kosuth) or mathematics (Venet) not as presentationism, appropriation, or found-art, but as realism. In both High Conceptualism and, let us say realist painting there is not supposed to be any meaning beyond what is represented, beyond what you see. As in math, there is only one referent, one meaning. I’d argue that nevertheless the act or the strategy is not monosemic; nor is the use.
That even the monosemic is polysemic is Perreault’s Paradox. The strategy (and the result) of monosemic art is a critique of polysemy and pansemy in art and in life and perhaps much more rather than much less.
Falling Into The Gap
This leads to the mystery of what Venet was doing between 1970 and 1975 when he was no longer an artist: he was trying to figure it all out.
Unhappy with the critical interpretations of his work, he decided to do the job himself, at least for his own satisfaction. Fortunately, he discovered the little-known semiology of Jacques Bertin, whose key categories are the polysemic (figurative images), the pansemic (abstract images), and the monosemic (math symbols and diagrams). The monosemic is defined as having one meaning and one meaning alone. This was what Venet was after!
This explains why, although I knew Venet was doing something new, I could not quite understand exactly what. Not unlike the artist himself, I did not yet have the key. He was making art that was neither figurative nor abstract, but instead monosemic.
So the first part of the mystery is solved: Venet was examining his own production and, apparently, learning from it. Why he began to make art again is not clear. So, as in life, one mystery leads to another.
The new sequence goes like this: Paintings inscribed with the angles and/or the arcs the stretched canvas employs. Then wall-reliefs. Then wooden sculptures. Then the metal pieces that really re-established him as a viable (i.e. marketable artist). The work is what the minimalist used to call self-referring. The cold-rolled metal works begin by describing the equations of their titles. And then…
Venet breaks free and begins doing what he calls "Indeterminate Lines," essentially scribbles in space, composed ad hoc at a metal steel workshop. Some are singular some are heaped or joined at random. All are elegant.
Because his "poems" (I think more science and math quotes) are published in Switzerland, he begins to think that they would look good on his bedroom wall in the South of France Thus begins his murals of mathematical formulae, stenciled on flat expanses of bright but, he says, arbitrary color.
And then paintings. And now paintings of superimposed formulae and equations.
If The Shoe Fits
Although we may never know if there were also personal reasons for Venet to give up conceptual art and then six years later start up again making highly saleable (but also, if we are to believe him) totally monosemic art objects), we have solved the largest part of the mystery. We also now know that Venet is the best French artist since Yves Klein, perhaps to use his own definition of art, the only artist since Klein. …
Nevertheless we wonder who Venet refers to when in various statements and interviews he accuses a certain artist or even certain artists of certain things (mostly commercialism or what amounts to bad faith, and in one case back-dating).
We do learn, from the horse’s mouth, as it were, that Venet was not influenced by Ben Vautier (although as a young man he hung out at this School-of-Nice artist’s record shop and watched him "write" his paintings). Venet was not influenced by Arman, though he sometimes stayed in that artist’s Chelsea Hotel apartment. He clearly was not influenced by any of the French New Realists, although he traded his art for some of their work. And although he may have been inspired by Yves Klein’s famous fake artist-in-flight photo, A Man in Space! The Painter of Space Leaps into the Void!, it would be difficult to believe that any of Klein’s metaphysical content could have influenced him. Although Venet met them in New York, he was also not influenced by George Macuinas or Dick Higgins and therefore was immune to Fluxus. He met and professes respect for both Donald Judd and Ad Reinhardt, But, did they influence him? I bet not.
Venet has truly re-written himself through artist statements, interviews and commissioned essays. To believe the artist is to believe his conceptual work is different from all other conceptual art and that he alone has escaped commercialization or its insidious equivalents, unlike certain other artists. Which is why we still need historians and critics.
Fortunately, each re-write–and here I agree with Besson–is fuller, more truthful than the previous attempt. Venet is grappling with his own mysteries. At times, he approaches the sagacious as in the following from an interview by Francoise Gaillard:
If science accepts that its knowledge is relative, the first lesson we artists have to draw from it is that we better recognize the relativity and limitations of our ideas, their restricted and temporary character. We should know that even those ideas most opposed to our own fall into the realm of possibility. The history of contemporary art had better be seen as home to multiple evolutionary lines, a framework of sorts that goes off in all directions.
Or in Laura Tansini’s interview for Sculpture Magazine:
…the concept of art is an open concept. We have to be prepared for new creations, new entities which will contribute to extending this category called aesthetics.
The paradox is that in order to make art one must each time move beyond the domain of art. For those who believe that they can define what art is and what its goals are, I would like to remind them that, as philosophy teaches us, "the world is intrinsically devoid of meaning, foundation and finality," so how could it be any different for art?"
