WHY PHILOSOPHERS LIKE YOUNG ARTISTS

“Time is out of joint!”, exclaims Hamlet… Time has ceased to be the measure; it is instead the form of the unmeasurable. Philosophers explain this turmoil surrounding the conception of time by showing its passage from an ancient conception to a new intuition. In the past, the mind sized up movement using time as a rule in order not to lose its footing in the agitation of the universe. Now it understands that the world itself is born of time: the world understood as the general form of all that is affected by the power of change. Time is at the origin: it makes apparent that no one thing is what it is or is what we think it is but rather its becoming and its metamorphosis. Time as a great revealer: it subverts every essence, forcing each to include, to incorporate in their very nature the chaos of the event: time as the generator of new forms.
And where better to seek this power of revolution, this perpetual birthing, if not in the premises of a work of art.
Assemblage and dismantling are the two key gestures of the dynamism of Séverine Hubard. Scrap wood, odd frames, bric-a-brac and knick-knacks are swept along into her carnival of furnishings. Partitions, cupboards, desks, shelves: in a false complicity with the domestic universe, setting up a labyrinthine stage on which we can be, in turn, the actors or the stage managers, captives of a journey of multiple obstacles, or even spectators overhanging the theater. The labyrinths, which stretch out through the hodge-podge of panels and their makeshift assemblages, make light of the tendency towards bricolage, make fun of the basement and the attic, and demystify the dwelling. If the labyrinths seem to laugh at our indifferent and extravagant relationship to space, just like at our frenetic taste for accessories, they reveal their plastic and critical meaning only from above or in hindsight. These constructions reveal their design when we are overhanging them, from the platform or the balcony, there disclosing disillusioned images of houses of cards that have been knocked down. It is the moment when the spatial fable collapses onto the ground strewn with disassembled bits; meanwhile a violent wind knocks over the stage set, revealing a last trace of childish fury mixed with the all too human instinct of edification.
Among the titles that Séverine Hubard has chosen for her installations, that of “Defenestrated Landscape” is the most surprising; it reveals in one word the destructive charge that is implicated in the concrete realization of an intention that was at first constructive. The window frames are the metaphor of the frame and one of the most persistent models of the image, whether it be in painting or in photography. The frame delimits the plan, contains the perspective, and seals the figurative union of subject and composition. Faced with one such condition, the artist has the choice of consent or refusal: formalism of plan and frame or insurrection against the conventions of form and image. For if there cannot be a way of avoiding the obligation of giving form, and if the most pure imagination cannot entirely rid itself of images, it remains that the doubling of form and image imposes on the artist a precondition that he/she must attempt to challenge. The accumulation of the distorted frames stacked one against the other constructs a spectacular image of dislocation; it comes from a very elaborated form, very controlled, although this form be that of a broken alliance and of a defiance to the un-thought of the image.
For Séverine Hubard does not conceal any of the violence of the gesture nor of its symbolic force: a “thought towards death”. For a longtime the power of symbolizing was inseparable from an experience of imprisonment; such is, at least, the long melancholic lesson conveyed by one of the most ancient traditions of art. But the artist aspires to an emancipated image. In this sense, the defenestration designates both the leap into the abyss and the desire of a definitive resolution; in art, it is a question of making the image adhere to the forces of life, to its energy, and to its inherent grace. The leaping of the artist, it is the leap into Mount Etna, the fatal attraction for the volcano’s mouth of fire; the work of art, the sandal of Empedocles.
Instead of a view of the distant horizon, the multiple dismantled windows renounce the landscape for the benefit of an unsettling vertigo: as if the horizon had been vacillating, as if the field of vision had lost its function of anchoring the image itself. The image loses its continuity; the joints pop open revealing bothersome, superfluous pegs. The installations of Séverine Hubard proceed from an experience that recalls the reversal of our time consciousness: the coming of a force of infinite upheaval and the exuberance that accompanies it in unburdened hearts.
The leap into the void is none other than the image of a lightening of life. Its sensation is an “immediate lyricism”. The “Defenestrated Landscape” is not a panorama; there is nothing to contemplate. It is an action; nothing animates it but the power of a decision. It is “a history of rising suns” according to the formula of Gaston Bachelard speaking of the “ascensional psyche” of Nietzsche: “He who knows how to rise like the sun, in a single burst, knows how to lance his being into a destiny re-assumed each day.” This exploded form bursts out under the impulsion of a magnificent momentum. This momentum seems to throw itself towards nothingness only because the spirit that it carries under its wing would like to experience the headiness of a pure instant; in other words, it is an instant emptied of the burden of memory.

Jean Attali
Translated by Rebecca willamson & Tricia Meehan