Forty years after, the leaders of the French sixty-eight movement are more or less ruling the country, in the mass media, in advertising, as much as in politics itself. The French minister of foreign affairs was a sixty-eight leader and “Dany le Rouge’ (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) is now “Dany das Gr\u00fcne”, leader of the european green political group. Cohn-Bendit said something very interesting about the 68 movement, he said that it was the taking of power by a generation. That\u2019s what they did, they\u00a0bring\u00a0to power a generation of baby-boomers who now still overrun the system of communication. The most interesting parts of that moment in western europe were in fact marginals to the movement, the situationists proposals, the\u00a0questioning\u00a0of the idea of work, and the raise of “desire” as a goal (and later on the\u00a0analysis\u00a0of Deleuze). In a way, this sixty-eight generation used the situationist idea of \u201cd\u00e9tournement\u201d (roughly translated by \u201cdiversion\u201d) as a tool for advertising. The so-called \u201cspirit of 68\u201d became the\u00a0biggest\u00a0tool to use the principle of desire for\u00a0consumption\u00a0conditioning and gave a kind of new deal to contemporary capitalism. Marx analysis of the fetish character of commodities reached his highest level of transparency through this stealing of desire.<\/p>\n
Another recent historical moment I am more interested in is that particular time at the very end of second world war in Italy when \u201cPartigiani\u201d (partisans) were\u00a0propagandizing\u00a0for sabotage of the work through \u201cVolantini\u201d. Those small leaflets were sent in the wind anonymously in cities and villages of fascist Italy. In this emergency moment, the tool for fighting the oppression was a \u201cnot working\u201d or a \u201cworking badly or slowly\u201d attitude. In a leninist way, this attack against the holy idea of work is an exception.\u00a0Usually\u00a0Work is pride, Work is honor, Work is freedom. But in those months of forty-four and forty-five, work is the\u00a0enemy\u00a0as much as the Nazis.<\/p>\n
I look to a lot of those small historical objects with an intense emotion at the Instituto Gramsci and Fundazione Basso in\u00a0Rome. On one of them, I read “Dis\u00f2ccupati ! ” (\u201cMake yourself not busy !”) instead of “Disoccupati!” (‘Unemployed !’). In fact the difference is only in the position of the accentuation when you say it. The italian verb \u201cDisoccuparsi\u201d is for me the symbol of that\u00a0beautiful\u00a0position. There is no real translation in french or in english of this. My computer roughly translate as \u201cto vacate itself\u201d, maybe something like \u201cto make oneself not busy\u201d is closer. Somehow the \u201cFare Niente\u201d is a more complex thing than the \u201cNe travaillez jamais\u201d. It\u2019s a real activity to \u201cmake yourself not busy\u201d.\u00a0In Italian, grammatically,\u00a0it\u2019s an active form.<\/p>\n
As an artist, I don’t think it is necessary to add objects to the world. I don’t believe on an artist as a “producer”. I have an activity which sometimes will end in an object and some times not. Anyhow, I do believe that the artist activity should lead to questioning the idea of Work itself, or at least,\u00a0include\u00a0that problematic. Somehow I search how can I des-occupied\u00a0myself. All of this is not so much about Revolution but about the desire of Revolution and so on, its impossibility. Desire and Revolution have the same color, the read of a lipstick on my mirror on an hangover morning.<\/p>\n
Forty years after, the leaders of the French sixty-eight movement are more or less ruling the country, in the mass media, in advertising, as much as in politics itself. The French minister of foreign affairs was a sixty-eight leader and “Dany le Rouge’ (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) is now “Dany das Gr\u00fcne”, leader of the european green<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1847],"tags":[1859],"corpus":[],"post_types":[1329],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1631],"class_list":["post-9355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-society","tag-social-conflicts","post_format-post-format-quote","post_types-chronique-en","authors-jean-baptiste-ganne-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9355","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=9355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9355"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=9355"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=9355"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=9355"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=9355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}