[wptpa id=”24″]<\/p>\n
In 2008, French artist Anne-Val\u00e9rie Gasc developed an art exhibit in which she appeared under the name \u201cGasc Demolition EnterpriseTM<\/sup>\u201d: Seven white blocks presented on stands, unclear whether or not they were generic architectural models or sculptures. The exhibit followed a rigorous procedure: Every two days, unless interrupted by a sale, one of the Blocks would be destroyed. The project lasted fourteen days. One of the exhibition rooms was dedicated exclusively to their devastation1<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n The online journal Paris-Arts commented on the exhibition2<\/a><\/sup>: \u201cAnne-Val\u00e9rie Gasc appropriates processes fundamentally distant from the art landscape when it comes to notions of conservation.\u201d Indeed, the destruction resulting from a non-sale presented one major inconvenience and two great advantages. The inconvenience: Only the works that saw public success were left in the wake. The artist\u2019s catalogue is incomplete and will remain so. But this could also be seen as an advantage: All that remains are artworks that elicited interaction. They alone deserve to survive. Anne-Val\u00e9rie Gasc\u2019s destruction of unsold works has another sizeable advantage: No storage necessary. Works are either acquired or destroyed. The artist leaves without any baggage.<\/p>\n Art, economy, value. How do they relate? Are there any artworks without monetary value that remain valuable for art\u2019s sake? The answer is clearly yes. But what of the opposite? Can the absence of monetary value act negatively on an artwork, to the point of overshadowing it? In another Subtraction Chronicle<\/em>, we mentioned the Salvage Art Institute, a New York research platform dedicated to deteriorated artworks that have lost all value and been locked away in the storehouses of the insurance groups that reimbursed their unfortunate owners.<\/p>\n We all want to appreciate art for art\u2019s sake, and not only is this possible, it is desirable, but that also means forgetting \u201cwhat sets the price\u201d and \u201cwhat the prices do\u201d. A seminar was held in Paris from 2014 to 2016 entitled \u201cChoses de prix<\/em>\u201d (Price matters). According to its initiator, French philosopher Patrice Maniglier, \u201cChoses de prix<\/em> is the result of a collective work that united art practitioners (artists, curators, critics, collectors, etc.) and practitioners in the human and social sciences (sociologists, anthropologists, economists, philosophers, art historians and historians of literature) to meet for two years about the price of things<\/em>, or more precisely, what prices do to things<\/em>.\u201d Maniglier continues: \u201cWe asked ourselves what it means for things to have a price and to pass, for example, from gift to merchandise, collector\u2019s item to relic, free sample to waste. It seemed to us that art objects were a special laboratory for observing these mechanisms, due to the particularly obscure price-setting rules in art.\u201d<\/p>\n But back to our topic, Subtraction: In 2019, value aside, is it still relevant to make works of art? It just seems that there are too many of them. But there are many scenarios in which artists annihilate their own work. So many that we can even legitimately speak of an alternative art history, one that echoes the Gnostic adventures described by French writer Jacques Lacarri\u00e8re, \u201cA shadow-history, a counter-history whose successive pages make a desperate attempt to deny history itself.\u201d The Gnostics,\u201d writes Lacarri\u00e8re, \u201claugh at posterity, perenniality, the future, and all those snares and pitfalls of time in which man allows himself to be caught.\u201d What they preach \u201cis immediate flight, a desertion of the world and the demarcations of time.\u201d Patrick de Haas, senior lecturer of Contemporary Art History at the Sorbonne, additionally comments that there are \u201ctwo ways to prevent a disturbing artwork from producing any effect: either destroy it physically, if possible down to its memory, or museify it, if possible until complete anesthesia.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s end this chronicle by looking at a different phenomenon, that of artists who quit art. Here too, there is an abundant century\u2019s worth of scenarios. The reasons are extremely diverse.<\/p>\n Take the case of conceptual artist Alexander Melamid, originally from Russia and based in New York. According to the New York Times3<\/a><\/sup>, from 2004 onward, after a prosperous period in which he \u201ccelebrated and skewered mass culture\u201d together with another Russian-American artist, Vitaly Komar, Melamid quit the official art circuit in order to \u201cgo underground\u201d. He claims he \u201clost faith\u201d. When for a long time there was no sign of him, some even wondered if he\u2019d simply abandoned art altogether. Where did Alexander Melamid go? A few years later, in a 2014 New York Times interview with journalist Penelope Green, Melamid, still around, confesses: \u201cArt is not only physical pollution, it\u2019s intellectual pollution. Spiritual pollution. (\u2026)We were promised salvation by art. I was a passionate believer, until I realized it was one of those allegiances, like spiritualism or theosophy. All of this kind of semi-religious teaching, like Mary Baker Eddy or Madame Blavatsky\u201d (one of the founding members of the Theosophic Society). The interview goes on with his call to those trying \u201cto get rid of the affliction of being in art. Why not introduce a new curriculum? Introduce a course of plumbing or electrical work.\u201d It sounds like a joke, but Alexander Melamid is serious. At the end of 2014, he draws attention for his incongruous project \u201cMelamid\u2019s Institute of Responsible Re-Education\u201d4<\/a><\/sup>. Created in New York, the Institute is a collaboration with Phillip Gulley, about whom we know next to nothing, except that he\u2019s a contractor. What does the Institute propose? To re-educate all artists who wish to quit art. Its mission statement, formerly available on the Internet, spoke on behalf of \u201call those who attended art school\u201d and whose dreams were torn apart by the harsh reality that they would not earn tons of money but have a future of poverty, not see monumental success but failed opportunities. For them, \u2018we offer the possibility to complete certification in the following professions: appliance repair, car repair, AutoCAD, carpentry, daycare, landscaping, grooming, plumbing, security, etc.\u2019 The strangest thing about the case? Only five years after its creation, not a single trace of the Institute could be found.<\/p>\n THIS WAS: Forbidding oneself from making art objects as subtraction.<\/strong><\/p>\n Translation by Maya Dalinsky<\/strong><\/p>\n Cover: \u00a9 Ana\u00efs Enjalbert<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [wptpa id=”24″] In 2008, French artist Anne-Val\u00e9rie Gasc developed an art exhibit in which she appeared under the name \u201cGasc Demolition EnterpriseTM\u201d: Seven white blocks presented on stands, unclear whether or not they were generic architectural models or sculptures. The exhibit followed a rigorous procedure: Every two days, unless interrupted by a sale, one of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":15784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1847],"tags":[1854],"corpus":[1179],"post_types":[1329],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1627],"class_list":["post-14381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-counterculture","corpus-subtraction-chronicles","post_types-chronique-en","authors-jean-baptiste-farkas-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=14381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}