{"id":360,"date":"2014-03-12T01:17:59","date_gmt":"2014-03-12T00:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/?p=360"},"modified":"2024-06-21T13:30:14","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T12:30:14","slug":"tu-sempre-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/?p=360","title":{"rendered":"Tu, sempre # (english)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Installation Tu, sempre\u00a0<\/strong>
\n# 1, 2001, La cri\u00e9e, Rennes
\n# 2, 2002, EOF, Paris
\n# 3, 2003, Galerie de l\u2019Ecole des Beaux Arts de Tours Feb 13th- March 16th
\n# 4, 2003, Galerie Faux Mouvement, Metz, April 3rd – May 31st
\n# 5, 2003, Espace multim\u00e9dia Gantner, Bourogne Oct 11 – Dec 6th
\n# 6, 2004, La Compagnie, Marseille Jan 14th – March 13th
\n# 7, 2004, After Foucault<\/em>, Vacarme, Les Vo\u00fbtes, Paris Oct 9\/10
\n# 8, 2008, Centre d\u2019Art La Panera, Lleda Oct 22sd – Jan 4th
\n# 9, 2009, CRAC Languedoc Rousillon, S\u00e8te Jan 16th – March 8th
\n#10, 2010, Conversations Intimes<\/em>, Mus\u00e9e d\u00e9partemental de l\u2019Oise, Beauvais\u00a0\u00a0 June 19th – Oct 31st \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 #11, 2013, Um dia sem artes<\/em>, B3, Recife 1 dec\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 #14, Casa Hoffman, Bogota, Colombia, Artifacts<\/i>, (version gb, esp + col)\u00a0 24 sep au 22 oct 2021 \u00a0 https:\/\/casa-hoffmann.com\/portfolio\/barbara-krulik-mildred-duran-2\/<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 #15, Mucem, Marseille, L\u2019\u00e9pid\u00e9mie n\u2019est pas finie<\/i>, Tu, sempre #15 (version gb, fr, por, it)\u00a0 4 dec 2021 au 2 mai 2022\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 #16 Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Expos\u00e9es<\/em>, Tu sempre #16 (version fr gb, por, ita, esp) 16 f\u00e9vrier 14 mai 2023<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Co-realisation: Thomas Koener, production La Cri\u00e9e, centre d\u2019art contemporain Rennes, Universit\u00e9 Rennes 2, Le Crea, as part of Mettre en sc\u00e8ne, Th\u00e9atre National de Bretagne<\/p>\n

\"many<\/a><\/p>\n

As an installation,\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>\u00a0is dealing with different Aids representation. Work about the history of these representations as much as about the way today these representations are often avoided. As if Aids doesn\u2019t exist, did not ever exist. A rotative screen of which one side is a mirror, received and diffracted within the gallery space images and texts about aids representation. Texts in French, English, Italian run from the screen to the walls, in a constant movement. The body presence is emphasize not only by our inclusion within the apparatus but also as the skin of different people. Two beam in the shape of an x are projected onto the rotative screen, inducing fragmentation, collisions onto the screen as much as on the walls.
\nA collection of photographs from lovers, friends, and anonymous, some dead, others still living, sick or not are placed on three walls. On the floor a map of world aids epidemic is projected.
\nThe ambient sound convey screams from demonstration as a text is delivered. Four voices can be listen at on separate CD.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis text which is not one: Tu, sempre by Yann Beauvais\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Keith Sanborn<\/strong><\/p>\n

I Cinema as text: text as cinema<\/p>\n

I will repeat once again: there exists prosaic and poetic cinema and this is the fundamental division of the genres: they are distinguished one from the other not by means of rhythm, or rather not by means of rhythm alone, but by the predominance of technical-formal elements (in poetic cinema) over semantic ones, in that formal elements replace semantic ones, in resolving a composition. \u201cPlotless\u201d cinema is \u201cpoetical\u201d cinema.<\/p>\n

Viktor Shklovsky \u201cPoetry and Prose in Cinematography\u201d trans. Keith Sanborn [\u201cPoezija y Proza v kinematografii\u201d in Poetika Kino Moscow and Leningrad 1927 Berkely Slavic Specialties reprint 1984, p. 142]
\nIf the facts destroy the theory-so much the better for the theory. It is created by us, not entrusted to us for safekeeping.<\/p>\n

Viktor Shklovsky
\n\u201cIn Defence of the Sociological Method<\/i>,\u201d Russian Poetics in Translation 4 (1977): 94. Originally published in 1927.<\/p>\n

How should we describe a work such as\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>\u00a0by Yann Beauvais? Visually, it consists of roughly 40 minutes of videotext in movement and arrest, largely white text varying in size on a black background, interspersed with a small number of images; its audio is a dirge of drone music by Thomas K\u00f6ner punctuated by voice-overs by several individuals, sometimes one at a time, sometimes several at once. Text appears in French, English and Italian and voice-overs are in French and English. It is a work of immense complexity and depth and this is but the beginning of a possible description.<\/p>\n

And where should we situate it historically? by genre?<\/p>\n

The familiar formulations of genre in narrative will get us nowhere: it\u2019s not a western, it\u2019s not a musical, or a detective film. But those familiar with the history of avant-garde cinema will have already recognized even from the sketchy description given above that this work belongs to the genre referred to as the \u201ctext piece.\u201d A short definition would be: a media work in which the use of text is visually foregrounded. The best known examples would be Richard Serra and Charlotta Schooman\u2019s\u00a0Television Delivers People<\/i>\u00a0(1973) in video, Michael Snow\u2019s\u00a0So is this<\/i>\u00a0(1982) in film and perhaps Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries flash movies from the late 1990s on-line. In fact, since the 1970s, text, in the form of both written and spoken language, has enjoyed a resurgence and integration with images largely unknown in experimental cinema since the beginning of the sound era. The works of Yvonne Rainer, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Su Friedrich, Craig Baldwin, Peggy Ahwesh, Guy Debord and Ren\u00e9 Vi\u00e9net come to mind. The work of Isou, Lema\u00eetre and Christopher MacLain should be remembered as well, though they precede and fall somewhat outside the more widespread revival of interest in text as cinematic form.<\/p>\n

The recuperations of the genre by American television commercials of the 1990s testify to the wide recognition of the historical importance of this work. For as Manfreddo Tafuri has pointed out, the fate of formal innovation in the arts is to be coopted by advertising.<\/p>\n

Within the varied body of Yann Beauvais\u2019s work,\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>\u00a0is one of several contributions to the genre. His earlier efforts include\u00a0Still Life<\/i>\u00a0(1997) (video)\u00a0sid a ids<\/i>\u00a0(1992) (video) andVO\/ID<\/i>\u00a0(1987) (double projection film). Beauvais is also accutely aware of the history of the genre, having been one of the principle curators of \u201cmots: dites, images\u201d (1987). This collaboration between Scratch and the Pompidou Center remains the major international survey of the use of text in cinema, making Beauvais one of the major contributors to the theoretical and historical formulation of the genre,.<\/p>\n

But the issue of genre is far from solved by simply labeling\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>\u00a0\u201ca text piece.\u201d For while it has pragmatic descriptive currency, such nomenclature is often little better within the domain of experimental cinema than \u201cwestern\u201d or \u201cmusical\u201d is among narrative films. And while it names a recognizable entity, it says nothing about the relationship between films of that genre and other films, broadly considered. A more interesting possibility for locating\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>\u00a0and others like it is offered by the work of Viktor Shklovsky and the distinction offered in the epigraph to this section of my essay.<\/p>\n

Shklovsky was one of the most thoughtful and widely educated theorists ever to seriously consider the relationship between film and literature. His basic division between prosaic and poetic, semantically dominated and formally dominated cinema has an elegant and intuitive simplicity about it. It offers the possibility of locating the fundamental dynamics of a work with respect to others. It says more than: It\u2019s one of these and not one of the myriad of others. Its difference from other works is a matter of insight across disciplines. It produces relational information, rather than simply adding data.<\/p>\n

To understand the basis of Shklovsky\u2019s generalization, we should recall that he worked not only as a literary theorist and experimental novelist, but as a script writer, so he is deeply aware of the difference between literature and cinema even as he looks to apply to the domain of cinema the analytical tools he has brought over from anthropology into literary theory.<\/p>\n

The title of Shklovsky\u2019s short essay referred to above, \u201cProza i poezija v kinematografii<\/i>\u201d plays not only on the dual meaning of \u201ckinematografija\u201d as \u201ccinematography\u201d and the \u201cfilm industry\u201d more generally speaking, but alludes to the metaphor contained in the Greek etymology of the word \u201ckinematografija\u201d: the writing or drawing of motion. In Russian, as in Ancient Greek, one writes an image, or draws a text: \u201cpisat\u2019\u201d does the same double duty as \u201cgraphein.\u201d As we might now understand it, the gambit is to suggest, by way of this etymological play, that the cinema may be understood as a form of inscription. If it is, then implicitly, the rules which govern the folk tale and literature should also apply.<\/p>\n

Further, Shklovsky alludes to the distinction he developped elsewhere between \u201cfabula\u201d and \u201csjuzhet\u201d-roughly \u201cstory\u201d and \u201cplot\u201d-a distinction which remains a fundamental theoretical reference point in the history of the attempt to analyze narrative in cinema. And while making this allusion to narrative, Shklovsky is attempting to point beyond the world of narrative cinema, to account not only for more familiar kinds of cinematic experience, but to see cinematic practice along a continuum comparable in breadth to the fundamental literary distinction between prose and poetry.<\/p>\n

The examples he adduces to illustrate this insight range from Chaplin\u2019s\u00a0A Woman of Paris<\/i>(prose) to Pudovkin\u2019s\u00a0Mother<\/i>\u00a0(which begins as prose and ends as poetry) to Vertov\u2019s\u00a0A Sixth Part of the World<\/i>\u00a0(poetry).<\/p>\n

Shklovsky was committed to serious analytical attention to both radical literary form and radical cinematic form. He had previously participated in and had written about the circles of Russian Futurist poets and painters; he was aware of their interest in joining linguistic and visual experimentation, such as in the work of Alexander Kruchenych. He also commented on the work of Vertov and the Kinoks. Perhaps because he takes radical experimentation both as an author and a subject, as one of his starting points, he is not one to flog a theory to death in order to make it align with practice, or vice versa. Throughout his work, he grapples with texts and experiences to reach insights into literary, political and psychological processes. If he\u2019s forced along the way to modify his positions and assumptions he does so, and humor with resilience. When he reaches a dead end, he reflects on how he arrived there, leaving engaging narratives of endless and pleasurable delays, of unexpected excursions.<\/p>\n

Tu, sempre puts Shklovsky\u2019s insight to the test and produces immediate paradox. For while Tu, sempre clearly belongs to the poetic cinema-the \u201cbessjuzhetnoe kino\u201d [the plotless film]-which Shklovsky indexes to the work of Vertov, it is incorrect to characterize it as replacing semantic elements with formal ones in order to resolve the composition. The semantic aspect of this work, which we will consider later, is of fundamental urgency.<\/p>\n

Tu, sempre offers a direct challenge to Shklovsky\u2019s basic rules of cinematic form, because in spite of the supple and intuitive justice of Shklovksy\u2019s insight, it somehow fails to account for a cinematic text-and let us remind ourselves that \u201ccinematic text\u201d is, after all, a metaphor-which foregrounds text itself equally as a strategy of cinematic form and as a vehicle for semantic content.\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>\u00a0further problematizes, while clearly posing the question, of the meaning of the resolution of a composition, in other words, closure.<\/p>\n

Considering the matter in terms of one modernist conundrum of set theory,\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>and the genre of \u201ctext pieces\u201d intersect with the textual metaphors of film theory in the way that both chimeras and golden mountains famously belong to the set of non-existent objects: they are members of the set of all sets which are non-members of themselves. This genre, as practiced over the past 30 years, occupies one of several spaces between \u201cart\u201d and \u201ctheory,.\u201d Ironically, or by design, it tends to subvert the claims of the kind of theory, based on the metaphors of linguistics, that may even have suggested it. And that is a most instructive work of destruction.<\/p>\n

We might dismiss this paradox as contrived or even \u201cinevitable\u201d since Shklovsky set out those rules in 1927 and Beauvais made his work at the turn of the next century, but even by 1927 cinema practice had developed to the point where Tu, sempre might be considered a special case of the art of the intertitle. For animated titles were well known in the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and Dekeukeleire\u2019s forty-nine-minute Histoire de d\u00e9tective, which consists of intertitles interspersed with a few deliberately banal images, would appear only 2 years later. Tu, sempre would not have been a technically inconceivable work in film for Shklovsky. Even sound recording was already known and The Jazz Singer, which had just appeared, was far from the first instance of experiments in synchronized sound.<\/p>\n

II. D\u00e9tournement as negation and prelude<\/p>\n

Le plagiat est n\u00e9cessaire. Le progr\u00e8s l\u2019implique. Il serre de pr\u00e8s la phrase d\u2019un auteur, se sert de ses expressions, efface une id\u00e9e fausse, la remplace par l\u2019id\u00e9e juste.<\/p>\n

Lautr\u00e9amont, Po\u00e9sies II,1870<\/p>\n

Le plagiat est n\u00e9cessaire. Le progr\u00e8s l\u2019implique. Il serre de pr\u00e8s la phrase d\u2019un auteur, se sert de ses expressions, efface une id\u00e9e fausse, la remplace par l\u2019id\u00e9e juste.<\/p>\n

Guy Debord , La Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 du Sp\u00e9ctacle, Section 207 1967<\/p>\n

In positioning\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>\u00a0as a social form of intelligence, Beauvais makes use of the legacy of the cultural and political strategy known as \u201cd\u00e9tournement.\u201d It was first theorized by Gil Wolman and Guy Debord in the 1956 as one of the perennial weapons of the avant-garde and later became one of the principle strategies of the Situationist International in their critique of the dominant ideology of their era. The Situationist International, in the first issue of their magazine, Internationale Situationiste (1958), provided the following definition:<\/p>\n

d\u00e9tournement<\/p>\n

S\u2019emploie par abr\u00e9viation de la formule : d\u00e9tournement d\u2019\u00e9l\u00e9ments esth\u00e9tiques pr\u00e9fabriqu\u00e9s. Int\u00e9gration de productions actuelles ou pass\u00e9es des arts dans une construction sup\u00e9rieure du milieu. Dans ce sens il ne peut y avoir de peinture ou de musique situationniste, mais un usage situationniste de ces moyens. Dans un sens plus primitif, le d\u00e9tournement \u00e0 l\u2019int\u00e9rieur des sph\u00e8res culturelles anciennes est une m\u00e9thode de propagande, qui t\u00e9moigne de l\u2019usure et de la perte d\u2019importance de ces sph\u00e8res.<\/p>\n

This is the necessary form of plagiarism of which Debord speaks when he detourns Lautr\u00e9amont in the passage from Society of the Spectacle cited above as an epigraph. Lautr\u00e9amont is acknowledged as the patron saint of creative plagiarism, a practice to which he had extensive recourse in creating his own literary works. These were widely admired by the Situationists and, for that matter, the vast majority of important 20th century intellectuals in France. In the Society of the Spectacle, just after his own d\u00e9tournement of Lautr\u00e9amont, Debord offers this refinement:<\/p>\n

Le d\u00e9tournement est le contraire de la citation, de l\u2019autorit\u00e9 th\u00e9orique toujours falsifi\u00e9e du seul fait qu\u2019elle est devenue citation; fragment arrach\u00e9 \u00e0 son contexte, \u00e0 son mouvement, et finalement \u00e0 son \u00e9poque comme r\u00e9f\u00e9rence globale et \u00e0 l\u2019option pr\u00e9cise qu\u2019elle \u00e9tait \u00e0 l\u2019int\u00e9rieur de cette r\u00e9f\u00e9rence, exactement reconnue ou erron\u00e9e. Le d\u00e9tournement est le langage fluide de l\u2019anti-id\u00e9ologie. Il appara\u00eet dans la communication qui sait qu\u2019elle ne peut pr\u00e9tendre d\u00e9tenir aucune garantie en elle-m\u00eame et d\u00e9finitivement. Il est, au point le plus haut, le langage qu\u2019aucune r\u00e9f\u00e9rence ancienne et supra-critique ne peut confirmer. C\u2019est au contraire sa propre coh\u00e9rence, en lui-m\u00eame et avec les faits praticables, qui peut confirmer l\u2019ancien noyau de v\u00e9rit\u00e9 qu\u2019il ram\u00e8ne. Le d\u00e9tournement n\u2019a fond\u00e9 sa cause sur rien d\u2019ext\u00e9rieur \u00e0 sa propre v\u00e9rit\u00e9 comme critique pr\u00e9sente. (paragraph 208)<\/p>\n

While that paragraph could easily eat a hole in the page large enough to devour this entire essay, it will not, prevent us from recognizing that, in Tu, sempre Beauvais creates his own variation on this practice. The Situationists for the most part refused to footnote their collective works or to claim them as intellectual property, though they did copyright, footnote and claim their droits d\u2019auteurs for individually authored works. Beauvais, in a sense, has it both ways: first, immersing us in a sea of text, largely originating elsewhere, then, at the end, acknowledging that he has done so. He further reveals that some of the texts and all of the images were his. Music is credited and the identities of the speakers of the voice-overs are revealed. He credits those who provided technical and moral assistance to the project. And yet, the acknowledgement which frames the work as a counterpoise to the title card, carries this nuance: there is no simple way to identify which texts originate with what authors, or which voice-over belongs to whom. Beauvais\u2019s own voice and texts are undifferentiated from the others, except by what qualities we may extract from them at the moment. He positions himself as one subject among others, so that we may do so as well. He takes the further step of subverting his authority by giving his own name entirely in lower case in the three places in which it appears in the credits.<\/p>\n

In a parallel effort to problematize the politics of cultural and linguistic hierarchies, Beauvais uses not only texts in French but a great number in English and two in Italian in constructing the piece. Sometimes the English texts are translations of the French and vice versa. Sometimes a text may appear earlier then repeat itself later in its original language. Sometimes a text may be superimposed upon itself, with the text scrolling slowly up the screen from bottom to top while the same text crawls rapidly across it from left to right. This strategic device offers two conflicting senses of engagement. As the text scrolls vertically, we have a sense of reading at our own pace; as it moves horizontally, the speed at which we assimilate it seems controlled from without. Texts appear vertically as well, sometimes with letters oriented to the horizontal, one above the other, as in Apollinaire\u2019s Calligrammes, sometimes at right angles to the \u201chorizon,\u201d thus challenging what might be called a crawl or a scroll in these cases.<\/p>\n

Several other tactics are employed as well to control and to question the way text appears on the screen: sometimes a text will crawl from right to left while its mirror image-each letter flipped left to right-will crawl from left to right. Sometimes the process of mirroring occurs at the level of syntax, where a text will crawl from left to right in its normal order, while the same text crawls left to right with each word transformed so that the first letter appears last and the last letter first. At one point three, pairs of texts and their syntactic mirrors appear on screen. But there is more at stake than narcissistic entrapment in a labyrinthine mirror phase. What is at stake is an attempt to subvert the invisible, organizing hierarchical power latent in the givens of ordinary syntax, by holding a mirror up to language.<\/p>\n

We are being challenged to disinscribe and reinscribe these texts. And the effect we might compare with Shklovskian ostranenie [\u201censtrangement\u201d]. It is here taken to an extreme even Khlebnikov or Hugo Ball might appreciate, but with this difference: there is no utopian project of creating a transrational language [zaumnij jazyk], or even a nihilistic one of destroying language for the sake of shock. Rather as we decode these texts linguistically, we are forced to acknowledge the fact of their cultural and ideological coding.<\/p>\n

As texts are superimposed across a slow-motion pan of a wall with homophobic graffiti (\u201cAIDS CURES FAGS\u201d), upon rushing landscapes of trees which dissolve to hand-held excursions across male limbs and torsos, across blank and tatooed skin, we are given composite images of the inscription of this network of social text upon the body politic as upon individual bodies.<\/p>\n

While the broad outlines of a strategy of d\u00e9tournement may recall work such as Michael Wallin\u2019s\u00a0Decodings<\/i>\u00a0of 1988, it is here not pre-existing images which are recaptured for a delirious personal erotic narrative, but the texts-out of which AIDS has been created as cultural construct-which are placed under scrutiny, a word, then a letter, at a time. Tu, sempre analytically bodies forth the process by which this composite ideological construct of collective experience has been inscribed in \u201cour\u201d consciousness.<\/p>\n

It is crucial to note, however, that this project has as its focus no master narrative-even by way of a montage of these inevitably familiar and unfamiliar texts-but rather the possibility and necessity for the construction of individual subjectivities, insights and intelligences around these texts and around the experiences they convey.
\nIII. closure, disclosure<\/p>\n

\u201cI assert to begin with, that \u2018disease\u2019 does not exist. It is therefore illusory to think that one can \u2018develop beliefs\u2019 about it to \u2018respond\u2019 to it. What does exist is not disease but practices.\u201d Thus begins Fran\u00e7ois Delaporte\u2019s investigation of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris. It is a statement we may find difficult to swallow, as we witness the ravages of AIDS in the bodies of our friends, our lovers, and ourselves. But it is nevertheless crucial to our understanding of AIDS because it shatters the myth so central to liberal views of the epidemic: that there are, on the one hand, the scientific facts about AIDS and, on the other hand, ignorance. I will therefore follow Delaporte\u2019s assertion: AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices. This assertion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. Least of all does it contest the reality of illness, suffering, and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations, or the culture, or the politics of AIDS. If we recognize that AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then hopefully we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cAIDS: Cultural Analysis\/Cultural Activism\u201d Douglas Crimp. October 43<\/p>\n

There has been a great number of works of art, and it seems above all in video, which have responded to the collective agon of AIDS: quiet and unflinching personal documents of love and devastation, such as\u00a0Silver Lake Life<\/i>, works which have responded to public images of AIDS and attempted to undo the damage such as John Greyson\u2019s, records of incandescent rage and insight such as the work of David Wojnarowicz. I cannot even begin to suggest the range, nor would I pretend to be capable of it. What I think I can say is that, in this and in his previous works that have made an address to the pandemic, Yann Beauvais has taken a different route from others I know. He has given us its aspect as an inscription: in the way that text enters social discourse and personal consciousness, in the way graffiti may be written on a wall, in the way a needle and ink may create designs under the skin, and in the way Kaposi Sarcoma may inscribe its lurid presence. And he has provided us with models for its disincription and reinscription in a higher form of critical awareness.<\/p>\n

We begin with 10 seconds of silence and darkness. The title fades up: \u201cTu, Sempre<\/i>\u201d-You, always-like a phrase from one of the ubiquitous Italian pop songs that form part of the everyday soundscape of Paris. It lingers a while then fades to black. In black, a series of low slow notes on an organ begin. Then the first installment of what seems like an unending stream of text starts to make it way across our field of vision:<\/p>\n

My body feels like a third person in the room, my mind is a second person, my friend a second person, the doctor absolutely necessary.<\/p>\n

This text disappears into black and the drone, like the distant hum of propellers-which will form the sonic ground of the piece-begins. Though this text disappears, it leaves an indelible impression on us. We have already begun to feel a very particular kind of fragmentation, a peculiar distance from our bodies. We become witness to the motions of these texts and at the same time to the motions of our own minds as we encounter them, parse them, lose them. We are overwhelmed. We are swimming against the tide. We can snatch only partial and fleeting impressions of some larger whole, the outline of which remains always beyond our grasp. Each is a part of some familiar yet arcane construction of the world. We return always to that \u201cTu, sempre\u201d that second person, the mind which witnesses the spectacle of our interiority as it has been socially determined.<\/p>\n

We have entered the world of HIV, of AIDS as it has been constructed, as a social textuality, which is nonetheless an inscription upon our bodies and our minds-as if there could ever be a discernible difference. The challenge, as Douglas Crimp underscores is that \u201cIf we recognize that AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then hopefully we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them.\u201d \u201cImperative\u201d is the key word here.<\/p>\n

Tu, Sempre<\/i>\u00a0reminds us that the challenge is daunting as it is urgent. At every moment, we run the risk of being overwhelmed by the unrelenting assault on our very subjecthood. We grasp for hope, gasp for hope, but hope is in short supply. We must each struggle to form a radical subjectivity in the midst of such profound interior assault. The experience of a single viewing can be dizzying, and each successive viewing remains vertiginous, but the possibility exists that even if we cannot entirely master our vertigo, we can come to realize it as an aspect of our condition. The drone and confusion of voices can become a sign of the presence of other minds as much as the index of solitary consciousness alone.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Tu, Sempre<\/i>, we travel the distance from the recognition that Silence = Death to the insight that Voice does not necessarily equal life. And while death represents a form of closure we must all confront, in discourse, epistemological closure, formal closure, semantic closure are all dead ends for the subject in the midst of AIDS. No work can be perpetual in its longevity, its structure, or in the attention we devote to it. A digital video work participates in these limitations, whether it loops or not. Whether the titles and credits of a work merely bracket its chronological expanse, or measure the space from one electronic pattern to another, whether they delimit the telling of a story, or a phenomenological experience of time, they are subject to this limitation. This work takes on the task of signaling to us something beyond itself, beyond the so-called \u201creal world,\u201dor rather alluding, without mystification, to the complexity of the patterns of the ungraspable fabrics out of which we fashion the textures of the \u201creal.\u201d<\/p>\n

IV The age of digital reproducibility<\/p>\n

\u201cFiat ars-pereat mundus,\u201d says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l\u2019art pour l\u2019art. Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility\u201d (3rd version)
\nWalter Benjamin<\/p>\n

HIV\/AIDS has been a significant factor for many of these racist formations and has informed both national-popular politics and policy involving African migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, settlers and EC nationals.<\/p>\n

Woman is traditionally seen as \u201cother\u201d, she is defined as \u201cnot-man\u201d, and this is particularly clear in the context of AIDS. The body becomes the contested territory of AIDS, and for women, the ever-corporal sex, the body overwhelms the individual. Male HIV risk is based on behavior, what he does with his body; by contrast for woman it is who she is, not what she does. She is a dangerous body, defined by her gynecology: the womb and the vagina.<\/p>\n

et d\u2019ailleurs ce sont eux les p\u00e9d\u00e9s qui ont combattu et combattent encore pour que les autres cessent d\u2019ignorer ma pr\u00e9sence en Afrique, comme ce sont eux les p\u00e9d\u00e9s qui ont combattu et combattent encore pour que les autres cessent d\u2019ignorer le sida de ceux qui ne sont pas eux: le sida des prissoniers, le sida des toxicomanes, le sida des \u201c\u00e9trangers en situation irr\u00e9guli\u00e8re\u201d expression faisant partie du vocabulaire que les autres en parfaite complicit\u00e9 avec \u201cla vie\u201d inventent chaque jour afin d\u2019humilier davantage ceux qui ne leur ressemblent pas et de leur \u00f4ter toute existence<\/p>\n

Plus d\u2019un million de Chinois avec un sida d\u00e9clar\u00e9 merci le commerce du sang<\/p>\n

branding
\nmarquer au fer rouge<\/p>\n

AIDS IS NOT ABOUT DEATH. IT IS ABOUT PEOPLE LIVING WITH AIDS. This is bullshit. I understand the concerns about media and how it has manipulated images which can affect public perceptions and funding for research and health care. But AIDS is not just asymptomatic muscle boys and kick boxing dykes leading the public against this virus. Those of us dealing with manifestations of this virus need room to embrace and look at the very real possibility of Death. Having seen many friends go through horrifying illness and dies, having fevers and night sweats for the last two months, feeling horrible and fragmented, I demanded that we don\u2019t slip into denial about Death as an aspect of AIDS<\/p>\n

Germany saw a 33 percent rise in HIV cases last year, the first increase in five years. Seven hundred and fifty new infections were recorded, 51 percent of them among gay and gays and bisexuals. Many developed nations are reporting stepped up HIV transmission. Health officials have blamed safe-sex fatigue ? and deliberate \u2018barebacking\u2019 among gay men for some of the increase.<\/p>\n

Barebaking has become so popular in the gay community that personal ads in gay papers and user profiles in AOL state barebacking only and no condoms. Barebaking is becoming the norm and condom use is the exception and uncoool. Protected oral sex is unheard of.<\/p>\n

We know that Silence Equals Death, but we have just recently realized that Voice does not equal Life.<\/p>\n

On ne peut combattre cette maladie sans soutenir directement ceux qui la vivent. (…) Un dicton africain me semble d\u2019une grande pertinence: \u201cOn regarde dans la direction de celui qui nous pr\u00eate ses yeux.\u201d Doit-on pour autant aller dans le sens des bailleurs de fonds d\u00e8s lors qu\u2019ils apparaissent en contradiction avec les valeurs des personnes qui vivent avec la maladie.<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s decision will make it the first country to violate the patent of an anti-Aids drug and represent[s] an aggressive move in the developing world\u2019s battle cheaper prices. Brazil has been one of the strongest voices in the developing world in the fight for cheaper prices and has threatened pharmaceutical multinationals that it would break their patents. The pressure work with Merck Sharp & Dohme, which agreed in March to reduce the price of Efavirenz, another drug in the anti-Aids cocktail, by 64%.<\/p>\n

Given the multiple levels and domains of power relations implicated in AIDS discourse, no system or situation can ever be compared by simple analogy to the next, or totalize by structural analysis. It is hazardous indeed to seek a single logic underlying AIDS discourse or policy decisions.<\/p>\n

There is no single universal educational answer to the challenges of HIV\/AIDS prevention, and demands for simple transcultural solutions are themselves symptoms of a na\u00efve globalism which has its political roots elsewhere in contemporary Leftist theory. Hence the continuing importance of repeating that there is no single, unified, global epidemic. Rather, as has long been apparent to those working in this field, there are distinctly different epidemics within any given country, moving at different speeds within different sections of the population, in relation to different modes of transmission, and different degrees and types of prevention work.<\/p>\n

I want to write about KS. I haven\u2019t really written about what I like now. I have a new skin. I have a new identity. They are not the same, but they do on occasion converge, even eclipse one another. …\/… I\u2019m looking at my arm and I don\u2019t trust what I just said. There is a geometry to this, a poetry too. If I didn\u2019tknow it was cancer and AIDS I\u2019d say my arm-my right arm-is interesting, attractive. The spots are grayish, purplish, a light eggplant, mauve-a combination… I\u2019m that sick. I could die that soon.<\/p>\n

V writing: painting<\/p>\n

SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, that\u2019s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter\u2019s products stand before us as though they were alive, but it you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words: they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it: it doesn\u2019t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.<\/p>\n

PHAEDRUS: Once again you are perfectly right.<\/p>\n

(Phaedrus, 275 d-e. trans. R. Hackforth, 1952, Cambridge University Press)
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Collection : Espace Multim\u00e9dia Gantner<\/p>\n

Visit\u00a0Thomas K\u00f6ner\u2019s website<\/a><\/p>\n

About AIDS, see\u00a0Act Up<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Installation Tu, sempre\u00a0 # 1, 2001, La cri\u00e9e, Rennes # 2, 2002, EOF, Paris # 3, 2003, Galerie de l\u2019Ecole des Beaux Arts de Tours Feb 13th- March 16th # 4, 2003, Galerie Faux Mouvement, Metz, April 3rd – May 31st # 5, 2003, Espace multim\u00e9dia Gantner, Bourogne Oct 11 – Dec 6th # 6, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[95,41,60,61,59,119,39],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-installations","tag-activism","tag-aids","tag-gay","tag-queer","tag-sida","tag-text-film","tag-women"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1944,"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions\/1944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yannbeauvais.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}