Power —Mapping
By Marco Antonini
The work of the French collective Bureau d’Etudes/Universit� Tangente looks like a challenge lost before it has begun. Active on the web for many years, the duo masters a complex and apparently despairing art: the graphic schematization of aggregative phenomena, personal interests and relationships between powers that regulate the dynamics and of the international socio-political scene.
The piece "the world government" (shown during the art event, "The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade"), for example, uses an entire wall of the tiny exhibition room of ApexArt to give shape and breath life into a web of economical and political relationships on a global scale. The intent of the representation couldn’t be more serious and strict: nothing is left to chance and the complex weave is revealed in each one of its details and secrets through a pliant itemized caption at the viewers’ disposal. The background of the composition is filled with a geometric structure that divides and relates the main ‘masses’ of the world politics. Nations and continents have a place in this area, a fundamental part of the work and the first element to get close to in an effort to comprehend the whole composition. The foreground of the graph is a crowded by an apparently chaotic body of hexagons, circles, coat of arms and various connections that presents persons, families, industrial groups, centres for scientific research and diplomatic organizations; these all stand in for the single "pieces" of the world’s political chessboard. This body of resources, energies and supranational powers oversees the management of human events while substituting its covert and fickle laws and procedures to the relatively debatable regulations of the ‘official’ politics.
As one gradually steps into the expansive scheme, the motivations of the artists become blatant; the choice of visual language becomes more and more intelligible: to represent, to reveal, to overwhelm and to give shape to movements inherently invisible, intangible, unintelligible. The striking detail and the absolute honesty of the intents of such a work (taken with the personality of the artists, who are apparently reluctant to call themselves artists and are much more interested in the political value of their work), gives strength to the confusion and the disconcertment that a work of such a size — even metaphorically — can’t avoid communicating.
My first encounter with the art of Bureau d’Etudes was completely accidental. I was working on the web and I ended up on their site almost by mistake, while I was looking for information about another artist. That artist was Mark Lombardi. I can’t really remember how I reached the site of Bureau d’Etudes, but what I know for sure is that the coincidence seemed incredible to me, because their works reminded me a lot of Lombardi’s style and concept. (To my surprise, they were entirely in the dark about Lombardi, and this aroused more of my curiosity about their art). The ingredients seem to be the same: a relatively antagonistic approach to art, intensive research, the formalization of covert events and mechanisms, a halo of unofficial information and conspiracy, maxi-sized flowcharts…but the parallel, in short, is undermined by some substantial and interesting differences.
Lombardi’s work clearly reflected the fine paranoia and obsessive nature of the research work from which it came; through an intricate graphic composition scrupulously and finely made with simple pencil marks, language curves turn into images as complex as crystal-clear.
These cosmologies of refined elaboration aim to evoke facts through the creation of an overall image that is as distant from the detail of the relations between the single illustrated elements as it is inevitably connected to them- almost becoming the connection itself. This intent is fulfilled when the scheme, as a separate entity, becomes the image of the single events told in the composition: the true star of the scene is both magic and mathematical organism. It is possible (as well as very interesting) to enter into Lombardi’s work analytically. However it is difficult to focus and avoid getting carried away by the fascination of their immense visual quality. In the Bureau d’Etudes’ work, on the contrary, the information becomes the object and the subject of the graphic composition, capitalizing on sensorial overload and inducing a desire to enter the piece in order to understand. The Bureau d’Etudes’ representation is poor, lacking in aura. Its grandiosity and eccentricity are at its contents’ disposal and the research work escapes from personal obsessions to turn to the audience in a controversial and ‘tough’ way, as studiedly trans-functional. What stands is the pleasure of a comparison between artists coming from different generations and distant cultural areas, united by brilliant and serious intuitions: to give shape to the invisibility of supranational powers and to get closer to the understanding of the underground mechanisms of the official politics, through their visionary but aware representation.
