We don’t make the party, we are the party: Trapier-Duporté inside Third Place.
Initially this text came from an intuition, altogether banal and shared these days, that art is happening somewhere else. Or at least, somewhere other than the usual places: art centers, art schools and galleries. In any case, it’s the feeling that art is no longer happening, at least not “here”, and the hope of finding it again, perhaps, somewhere else.
P.O.L, 2016.
Gallimard, « Folio essais », p. 29.
As an example of this symptom, take the article in I-D celebrating the “mix” and “unity” of Parisian youth at the Péripate squat to prove that there are no such things as “no-go zones”. Without wishing to cast doubts on the remarkable work by the Péripate and Freegan Pony teams to help refugees, it is noteworthy how the article completely contradicts itself in the homogeneity and “exclusivity” of the examples it cites in the name of diversity: two students studying unidentified subjects, one of whom explains that “the (Péripate) population is very eclectic, people there are totally different. There are whites, gays, blacks, trans” (find what is missing), a stylist assistant, an art school student, a business student, a start-up consultant, and last but not least, a model.https://i-d.vice.com/fr/article/qvkv5q/le-pripate-a-ferme-ses-portes-i-d-lui-rend-hommage
We can gloss over the anxiety and suspicion that has accompanied this concept since its invention in the modern era: art, like criticism, is by nature in crisis. “In an 1810 book about hunting, people bitterly complained about the disappearance of game”, muses Olivier Cadiot in Histoire de la littérature récente. Tome I. “Oh, it’s…