MATHIEU BEAUSEJOUR

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Né en 1970, vit et travaille à Montréal, Canada.

Mathieu Beauséjour est principalement connu pour son opération d’estampillage de billets de banque, Survival Virus de survie (1991-1999), dont les « Rapports annuels » et autres productions connexes ont fait l’objet de plusieurs expositions individuelles.

Son travail a été exposé au Canada, en Colombie, France, Grande- Bretagne, Allemagne et Serbie. Il a reçu une distinction du Conseil des Arts du Canada et du Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Il a obtenu le prix Giverny Capital 2009-2010. Son travail a fait l’objet d’essais dans de nombreuses publications et magazines d’art.

Mathieu Beauséjour . Le Soleil mon oeil

J’ai vu au Schwules Museum de Berlin un paysage dessiné où seuls les rayons du soleil occupaient le ciel. L’astre lumineux n’était pas représenté ou il l’était plutôt par son absence. Cette image d’un rien qui émane m’a frappé. J’ai senti bon de la reproduire pour voir où ce vide pouvait m’entraîner et jusqu’où ces rayons pouvaient m’éclairer.

J’ai voulu comprendre cette absence qui rayonne, ce trou qui irradie. Le soleil allait devenir l’archétype d’un vide qui engouffre, qui se consume tout en étant resplendissant.

L’image du soleil est symboliquement somptueuse, inépuisable et effrayante. Elle est un dessin d’enfant, une représentation de la divinité et un symbole impérial. Le soleil noir, l’éclipse et le soleil dans son état négatif appellent quant à eux la catastrophe, l’apocalypse et la mort. Lorsqu’il est jaune, le soleil s’apparente au plus précieux des métaux et à son opulence. Vu de la Terre, il est à la fois lumière et obscurité vacillant dans sa révolution.

À l’été 2009, j’allais m’installer pour un mois de résidence au centre Est-Nord-Est à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. Dans mon nouvel atelier vide, blanc et lumineux, j’apportais quelques surfaces préparées au gesso, des stylos et des règles. Je voulais arriver à mon but par une économie de moyens et, par un geste répétitif et absurde, occuper le maximum de mon temps. Comme la trotteuse d’une horloge, j’allais réaliser des dessins autour d’un point central et marquer une révolution autour d’un soleil immobile et vide. Ce même vide que l’atelier m’offrait devait se remplir par de simples traits de crayon.

L’idée de travailler uniquement la ligne noire et sa répétition vient d’une étude des emblèmes héraldiques. Dans les gravures anciennes en noir, on peut reconnaître des motifs de hachures qui forment un code de couleur. En m’inspirant du concept d’une traduction de la couleur par un code noir, mes dessins comprendraient toutes les couleurs du prisme. Je pense ces dessins comme des blasons, des portraits et des objets optiques dans lesquels le regard se perd. Un cercle dans un rectangle, un point (de fuite) sur une surface. L’effet moiré provoqué par l’enchevêtrement des lignes du dessin s’apparente aux guillochis des billets de banque. Un lien économique, la fascination de l’argent, était en place.

C’est alors que l’image d’Icare m’est apparue à l’écoute d’une chanson folk (Changes, Icarus, 2006). Il devenait évident que ma réflexion esthétique pouvait, par extension, devenir une allégorie du mythe de l’homme qui s’envola vers le soleil. Je me suis questionné sur la notion de vision : rétinienne, hallucinatoire. Quel serait l’effet sensoriel, visuel et sonore à l’approche du Soleil ? Une image du soleil rayonnant et éblouissant. Un grondement assourdissant.

Fuyant le labyrinthe et désobéissant à Dédale, Icare s’envole vers le Soleil. Le mythe grec ne mentionne aucunement la motivation d’Icare à aller plus loin. En art et en littérature, la chute d’Icare nous a été maintes fois représentée. Mais nous ne connaîtrons jamais sa version de l’histoire, jamais nous ne saurons ce qu’il a vu ou ce qui l’incita à aller aussi loin. Quelle séduction, quelle emprise eut le Soleil sur Icare ? Celui-ci a-t-il commis un acte de dérogation, de délinquance ou de transgression à la loi de son père ? Aurait-il eu un sentiment de pouvoir si grand à l’approche du Soleil qu’il aurait ressenti une confiance en soi absolue ? Quelle fut la vision de son dernier instant, une vision qui brûle les yeux, un aveuglement ?

Le mythe d’Icare est une incarnation des ambitions démesurées de l’esprit, de l’intellect devenu insensé et de l’avidité de pouvoir. Pensant aux civilisations qui ont vénéré le Soleil, on ne peut que constater leur chute. Tous se brûlent les ailes. Je crois que notre monde contemporain n’y échappe pas. En fait, il est peut-être encore plus apocalyptique : le soleil nous brûle littéralement la peau, il assèche la terre et perturbe les champs magnétiques. La science nous donne à voir les ondes et les éruptions solaires ; les photographies et les enregistrements du Soleil nous permettent de mieux imaginer son attraction chaotique. Tout comme le myhte, les formes actuelles du Pouvoir exposent l’irrationalité et l’avidité qui s’y rattachent. Nous avons déplacé l’attraction du Soleil vers son symbole, l’or. À partir de cette réflexion et de ce point de vue, du moment dans le mythe où Icare est suspendu dans les airs, qu’il désire, qu’il aspire à sa liberté et à sa mort, j’exécute une allégorie de la chute de l’empire capitaliste.

Mathieu Beauséjour

Icarus . Of Shadows And Light . Text André Louis Paré . Tr Bernard schütze

The above-cited aphorism, which appears in the opening pages of the The Gay Science, is dedicated to a “light-lover.” Who is this lover? Probably one of the characters belonging to this constellation nietzsche refers to further on as the “star friendship.”(2) yet couldn’t it be icarus, the impetuous son who, after escaping the labyrinth, decided to fly towards the sun with the wings his father Daedalus had fashioned for him? The work Icarus: Empire Falls, an installation by Mathieu Beauséjour, leads us to believe so.

according to ovid’s version of the legend, icarus disobeyed his father in wanting to approach the sun, and this caused him to lose his wings and plunge abruptly into the sea.(3) after realizing that his son had died, Daedalus buried him on an island which he named icaria in his memory. Based on this tale, Beauséjour created several drawings in which one can discern suns surrounded by hundreds of rays drawn with a black pen. This series of eleven drawings is accompanied by digital photographs also depicting the solar symbol. it is completed by a looped video projection which displays the blinding light of the sun recorded by a low-end camera, and an immense metal gong suspended from the ceiling.

For the ancient Greeks, Daedalus was considered a skilled artisan, and even the inventor of the arts. according to legend king Minos called on his services to build a labyrinth in which to shut away the Minotaur. But after Theseus had killed the half-man half-beast monster, Daedalus and his son were imprisoned in it. it is to escape this place of many corridors that he made wings out of bird feathers and wax. nowadays, these are distant myths. But for the Greeks fictional discourses (the muthos) were a way of being in the world, a means to use the fantastic to represent an existence within an otherwise ungraspable nature. This ancient imagination, which claude Lévi-strauss fondly called the “savage mind,” used mythology to produce a state of being sensitive to life. For nietzsche, who continued to be interested in this language, the “superficial—out of profundity”(4) Greeks were well versed in the art of living.

among the gods of olympus there is Helios, the god of the sun. Because he crosses the sky everyday from east to west in a chariot pulled by winged horses, he is considered the eye of the world. The sun holds an important place in most mythologies. The aztecs, for example, sacrificed humans in a cult dedicated to it. Whereas with the the icarus myth, it is that to which one aspires to rise, but which, by the same token, causes the fateful fall. This double movement of ascend and downfall has been underlined by Georges Bataille, who sees this as the mark of two suns with distinct functions.(5) in a story of another sort, it is the same fervor that moves oedipus to blind himself after finding out the truth about his origins.(6)

With Plato, philosophical discourse was also to give the image of the sun a privileged position. in the Republic, the theme of which is justice, the sun is the principle and cause of all there is. as the day star which makes things visible and enables sight, it corresponds to the idea of the Good, to what is unchanging in the intelligible world. The well known allegory of the cave demonstrates this. in this story men are kept in a cave where they are condemned to view images they consider to be reality since their childhood.(7) only men with a will to know, the friends of wisdom, aspire to something else and turn away from the world of appearances so as to follow the path which leads to the sun—the principle of knowledge here on earth.

With Platonic philosophy the link between the sun and the eye is maintained, but as part of a will to knowledge in which the relation between the two is now based on resemblance and no longer on identification as in the myth.(8) This resemblance is embodied in the conception of man as a rational being. From a strictly anthropological viewpoint, the eye—the organ of sight—is now made superior to the other senses: hearing, smell, taste and touch. it is also in this perspective that The Republic establishes a judicial and political organization which proposes a “distribution of the sensible.” in subordinating the sensible world to the intelligible, philosophy introduces a clear distinction between the muthos and the logos, between false and true discourse. From here on in, fables, but also poetry, theatre and made images, will no longer be acceptable on a moral level. Legitimated by a desire for truth, this distribution, which was to impact the philosophical scene for centuries, weakened the place and function of art within the Polis.

in pursuing the sun in the shade, nietzsche thinks about it only from a natural viewpoint. as with Bataille, this star keeps its multiple energy references. it is symbolic of one who spreads abundantly, but gives to the point of self-consumption. in refusing the platonic dualism, nietzsche also rejects the presumed leaving behind of the world of appearances, which he interprets as a negation of life. no longer associated with a back-world of ideas, solar energy turns all that appears to light into an appearance. For nietzsche this appearance is the sole reality of things, it is the meaning of the earth. under these conditions the paradigm of life is art as experience. in fact, it is with art that a knowledge of the world on earth becomes possible.

His book, The Gay Science refers to the gaya scienza, a term which evokes the saturnalias, the popular festivities during which the established order along with its values and so- called truth, is challenged by free spirits. in short, the gay science sets the tone of this thought whereby Platonism is overthrown after two millennia of idealist philosophy. Free spirits understand that consciousness and the intellect are no longer the privilege of thought. This privilege belongs to the body. as Freud was to say some years later “the ego is not master in its own house.”(9) Believing itself to be whole and isolated, as is the

case with the cartesian cogito, the embodied ego is in fact multiple, it explores, and ventures through a series of perspectives named chance. To be, as nietzsche wished, poets of our life, one must experience the plentitude of one’s subjectivity and consider self-awareness to be a fiction.(10) James Joyce was not mistaken in naming the hero of his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, stephen Dedalus.

in order to sum up the creative process Marcel Duchamp used the image of the labyrinth, which is associated with its builder, Daedalus.(11) The artist is not fully in control of his choices in this process. There is an unconscious component in creation that exceeds and goes beyond the subject. But Duchamp goes further. if the labyrinth appears to be inherent in an artist’s aesthetic, it is also complemented by the viewer’s input, which contributes to the posterity of works in culture. under these circumstances, artworks are seen as exhibition objects. no longer bound to their place of creation, they acquire an autonomy which allows them to be included in an economic structure and to be considered commodities with an exchange value. once integrated into the market, artistic creation has no other choice but to fall within the cultural logic of late capitalism.(12)

since Survival Virus de Survie, it is precisely by questioning the artwork and its exchange value that Beauséjour has developed his work. over the course of its evolution, this work has persistently implemented various resistance strategies to establish a wide network of ideas in which the themes of money, the economy, power and revolutionary utopia overlap.(13) it is hardly surprising that the figure of icarus, alongside Daedalus, should now be made part of it. in its association with the images of the sun and islands, it henceforth served to symbolize the notion of utopia.

The idea of utopia is modern. it appears at the moment when humanity is poised to free itself from nature and to imagine the world otherwise. yet, Plato’s Republic is also its ancestor.(14) in conceiving a Polis the goal of which is to ensure political harmony in the name of justice, the book initiated this search for perfection embodied by a well ordered society. Books such as Thomas More’s Utopia and Tomasso campanella’s The City of the Sun, clearly reaffirmed this aspiration to implement a mythic vision of political organization. The name of icarus also reappeared in a novel by Étienne cabet, The Voyage to Icaria. This political fable even inspired its author to establish the first utopian colonies on us territory.

even if these icarian colonies are among the first experiences with communist life, it is with the elaboration of the political project developed by the soviet union that modern utopia was to be achieved. The russian director nikita Mikhalkov aptly chose the title Burnt by the Sun for his film which denounces the ideal of a social transformation that culminated in a totalitarian system. in this case, the icarus myth feeds the nostalgia of the all-one and forces an ideal to be realized within a political regime that uses restrictions, deprivations and lies in an attempt to subject men to a complete state of dependency. This will to create, in the name of happiness for all, a political system that totally administers communal life leads to the reign of nihilism previously prophesized by nietzsche.

The failure of Leninist socialism and the entry into a planetary post-communist era may have left the impression that the idea of utopia has ended and may finally be left to plummet on the island of icaria. But this is to disregard that this notion, just like the word revolution, can be reformulated, transformed, and once again take flight. especially since triumphant capitalism, with its promise of prosperity, seems itself to be in a flap. under these circumstances, it appears evident that the traditional versions of utopia developed in the limited context of a Polis, which may or may not be imagined on an idyllic island, must give way, as rené schérer has suggested, to a vision linked to nomadism.(15) utopian thought will no longer remain on a strictly political-economic level. able to overcome territorial belongings and to confront the unknown, this thought associates revolution with a creative revolt.(16)

after nietzsche, Bataille was to radically continue the project of overthrowing Platonism.(17) Through his work he carried out an unusual return to the dark labyrinth of the cave. However, this required an anthropological conception which mixed mythology and science. as the animal who, thanks to the upright position, was able to rise up towards the sky like no other, man must nevertheless remain faithful to the earth. it is for this reason that Bataille considers the big toe the most human part of the human body.(18) consequently, the head, the traditionally privileged site of reason, becomes the seat of the pineal eye. This eye replaces Descartes’s pineal gland, which according to his theory enables communication between body and soul. Henceforth, thought is associated with the sexed body. The eye of knowledge becomes the most obscene of all the organs. Moreover, the sun, traditionally associated with the eye, is now reduced to the darkness of the solar anus, which became gradually forgotten from the moment that man stood up on his feet.(19)

With this anthropology, supported by a base materialism, a materialism of the abject, arises a new vision of the economy as an understanding of our way of being in the world. in parallel to the narrow economy, based on the laws of supply and demand, labour and productivity measured in terms of commodity value, one must also consider an open sky economy, described as a general economy which unfolds in a universe not controlled by calculation and profit, but instead governed by an extraordinary energy.(20) The symbol of this energy based economy is the sun. Viewed both as the star that causes and sustains growth, and as the one which gives without counting, to the point of self-consumption. This expenditure and excess economy is at work in ancient civilizations, notably with the aztecs who made sacrifices to the sun god—a compelling model of this consumption economy.(21)

Through the gesture it poses, artistic activity in its primitive state partakes in this economy of excess. From the outset, it always throws in more into the bargain. Bataille, as we know, identified the birth of art with the works produced on the walls of prehistoric caves.(22) yet, because the miracle of Lascaux is intermingled with a magical ritual, this birth of art is far from our understanding of the artistic scene. However, in this recent scene one encounters artists who, following Bataille, wanted to promote an art of excess. some of the artists of the 1950s and 60s discovered that artistic experience could harness this primordial force and they expressed themselves through violent and decadent gestures in a voicing of their revolt.(23) This return to physical drives in order to bring art closer to life, could be interpreted as a return to Dionysius, the god of drunkenness.

on the margins of the official exhibition system, these artistic operations also critiqued a postwar bourgeois society, which sought the tranquility and comfort of everyday life as it returned to a semblance of normalcy. This “artist-critique” is undoubtedly rooted in nietzsche, the sworn opponent of a political-economic system that reduces humanity to mediocrity. against this docile spirit, the gay science proposed, even before artistic creation by artists, the art of celebration, the celebration of existence.(24) an art of living which thus has nothing to do with what we are familiar with in the era of the society of the spectacle. Moreover, we are barely able today to imagine the role of the Dionysius-apollo couple as a paradigm of the creative process.

since the Birth of Tragedy, Dionysius, the god of dance, musikè, and the depths of the labyrinth, has been contrasted with apollo, the god of forms, measure, clarity, who is also often associated with the sun. Though the tendency it to oppose them, it must also be said that one cannot be thought without the other. Too much excess also calls for a system, and an ordered presentation. The art of celebration needs rest, the continuity of time and a recurrent rhythm. The installation Icarus: Empire Falls at first appears to be carried by an apollonian impetus. Moreover, these patiently crafted drawings—governed by repetition and made up of minutely ruler-drawn lines—are accompanied by music emanating from a gong that is also displayed in the exhibition space. The instrument emits sound waves which are generated by a recording of the artist’s heartbeat. These pulsations move the surface of the gong, the form and colour of which evoke the sun.

nietzsche characterized the idealist thinkers, who dream of an other, eternal world in which life survives us, as “heartless.”(25) The energy of the heart gives rhythm to life until death. it sets the rhythm of life in growth and decline. But it is precisely this life that the nomad utopias refer to; the heart of utopia is this pulsing life.(26)

1.
Friedrich Wilhelm nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter arnold Kaufmann, new york: Vintage Books, 1974, p.45.
2.
Ibid., p. 279.
3.
ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. a. D. Melville, oxford: oxford university press, 1986, Book VIII. 4.
Gay Science, op. cit., p.38.
5.
George Bataille, “rotten sun” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, edited by allan stoekl, trans. allan stoekl, carl r. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr, Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 1985.
6.
The oedipus myth is told in Oedipus Rex by sophocles. also of note is the film I as in Icarus (1979) by Henri Verneuil which tells the story of a prosecutor who is assassinated because he got too close to the truth about the murder of a political figure who was reelected president of his country. 7.
Plato, The Republic, Book VII, 514a-521c,
trans. Francis MacDonald cornford, new york and London: oxford university Press, 1945.
8.
Ibid., Book VI, 508 b.
9.
Freud, sigmund, A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James strachley, vol. XVll. London:
The Hogarth Press, p. 143.
10.
The Gay Science, op. cit., section 299, p. 189.
11.
“To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to
a clearing.” in Marcel Duchamp, robert Lebel, new york: Paragraphic Books, 1959, p. 77-78.
12.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991.
13.

For an overview of Mathieu Beauséjour’s
body of work, see the text by Bernard schütze, “revolution in the Works,” published in the catalogue Persistance, Montréal: Éd. Fonderie Darling, 2007, p. 7-18.
14.
Frédéric rouvillois (selected and edited by), L’utopie, Paris: Éd. GF Flammarion, coll. “corpus,” 1998, p. 169.
15.
rené schérer, Utopies nomades, Paris:
Éd. séguier, 1996.
16.
For the association between revolution and creative revolt in M. Beauséjour’s work, i am taking the liberty of referring the reader to my text “Mathieu Beauséjour: Persisting in negation,” english translation by Timothy Barnard, published in Parachute, Montréal, no. 115, p. 116-133.
17.
For more on the close relation between Bataille and nietzsche see: François Warin, Nietzsche
et Bataille. La parodie à l’infini, Paris: Éd. Les Presses universitaires de France, 1994.
18.
Visions of Excess, op. cit., “The Big Toe,” p. 20-24. 19.
Visions of Excess, op. cit., “The solar anus,” p. 5-8. 20.
“L’économie à la mesure de l’univers,” in Œuvres complètes, tome VII, Paris: Éd. Gallimard, 1970, p. 9-16.
21.
Ibid., p. 52-54.
22.
Georges Bataille, Lascaux; or, the Birth of Art, the Prehistoric Paintings, trans. austryn Wainhouse, Lausanne: skira, 1955.
23.
Laurence Dorléac Bertrand, L’ordre sauvage. Violence, dépense et sacré dans l’art des années 1950-1960, Paris: Éd. Gallimard, 2004.
24.
The Gay Science, op. Cit., section 89, p. 123.
25.
Ibid., section 372, p. 333.
26.
Utopies nomades, op. cit, p. 47.