VOICE OF THE DISAPPEARING

or

How certain species of artists die

The artists are dying

This is what I believe, beyond a formula for a bar (although there is surely little talk of artists at the bar), pronounced in a cookie-cutter manner.

They are dying like so many other animal species that are seeing their territory shrink because of the invasion of their land by humans.

Their wilderness is being turned into cultivable land; land is being cleared; the trees are being felled

We expand and settle in families, in well-organised social groups to maintain agrarian cultures. We push back the limits of savagery. Reserves are created so that the work of human nature can continue to be admired under control, in complete safety, through them. This is "culture" in the social sense; this is social networks; this is communication. Of course, some of them, more useful than others, get tamed, become pets and end up forming vast herds of creators on demand. It is not difficult to shear the wool off their backs. They have accepted to evolve like this. Domesticity has inhibited their instinct to flee from danger. Their gregarious temperament has accommodated the latest necessities of heritage: creating new audiences, new poles, new populations in harmony with what governments are trying, with less success than Silicon Valley companies, to grasp: the air of the times. They are fed a few handfuls of pellets, synthetic food in the form of fragile social recognition or a bit of invigorating entre-soi. An artist is useful when he serves the development of a city. When he does his part in the socio-cultural field, when he educates and initiates others to self-fulfilment, accepting to sacrifice his original fierce identity, already well blunted by the compromise of everyday life. Only they are no longer artists then. They are like so many others, the sheep of a nation. Of course, some of them turn out to be more bio than others. Better fed, healthier. These are even more attractive. They are a bit privileged and sell for much more. There is no eco-label for 'authentic artists' yet, but it will come soon. For the moment, they are only visibly better promoted, on more friendly shelves. They are sometimes awarded prizes and, in the best of cases, have their own gondolas, positively identified galleries and grandiose theatres. I wouldn't really mind if at least a small majority of them showed a little more perversity towards the system. To take advantage of it, yes; not to encourage its decay from its position, that's a shame. At the end of the day, very few of them have the savagery is not played, for lack of a sufficient desire to keep a record of it. Now pipe and phoney postureIn this way, the relative creativity, a distant memory of the savagery of being, is fossilised in the immemorial recesses of the time of their true desire to create. For it is true that nothing is simpler than to feign the pervasive feeling of it in all media circumstances. I am not saying that there is not a single authentic fibre left in them; I am saying that they have simply kept the imprint. The ghosts of the original genes are there, but they can't be used for anything.

No cultural body, even if it thinks it is benevolent, will think of returning them to their nature once it has helped them to develop in the right conditions, just as we release endangered species into their environment after having filled them up a bit. And then we ring them; and then we follow them, without disturbing them too much.

I wouldn't mind being banded, already stamped with so many numbers as we are. No. One more, what does it matter to me? One must naively believe that there is still a place to hide to fear classification, numbering and stamping. No, on the contrary, let them go there! On the other hand, as a price for my capture, I want some parts of my original environment to be maintained or restored. Let them make an effort and, once done, let them see to it that this new, factitious virgin land is disinfected of all parasitic presence, of all that unduly swarms there.

This is what I think would be a real project to save artists: the world is what it has become, okay; there is nothing we can do about it, yes. But since it's beautiful, a vital impulse, a bit like a feline in the bush or a giraffe rowing, it would be useful to identify these primitive artists and, first of all, to learn to do so without too many vague or partisan ideas about what they should be. And then the first answer that would come would be: anything but social actors. And then we would start by looking at those who don't know how to or don't want to be part of this citizen landscape. Those who don't think that art is needed everywhere, because then there won't be any art anywhere. Those who think that it is an unbearable horror to want to make transport nice with the help of professional street art of convenience or the soundtrack ludico too nice to announce Parisian tramway stations to travellers who are irritated by it. Because yes, the singular, the artistic, it irritates by force. It's even made for that. If it's spewed everywhere, like magazino-graphic-urban aesthetics, well, the art, the little bit of art that was in there, in this unfortunate little crap made with so little soul, the project as they say - well, it disappears. Nothing left in the gesture. Empty. No more gesture. No, a tramway is a tramway. It carries passengers, that's all. It needs to be large and comfortable, but not to be nice.

But then, it is often too much work for the curatorial scouts of the field culture; too much waiting and distant care in prospect to worry about skillfully repopulating the forests with individuals as virgin as possible from the contact of the caretakers, until they have forgotten them a little.

As for the great mass of the others, the specimens permanently intertwined with the generalist social link, their horns are dehorned as soon as the buds appear, their tusks and fangs are carefully filed down, and their claws lashed for greater caution. Let us not forget that these are animals intended for breeding.

So, of course, between these fruits, ripe as can be when they come from the top of the basket, those that are too green, hurriedly picked after leaving art school, and the splendid exotic creatures imported at Fauchon's, there are still a few lone wolves wandering in the cold. Sometimes they can also be found in weak, starving packs, not far from more peaceful ones, bellowing in the summer, in short, gathered herds. Thus, the more or less cloned livestock have become well-packaged showpieces, while others, fiercely hostile to compromise, still run around on their wobbly legs. Squeezed onto their stalls, the best cultivated berries know how to stick together until it is time to eat them. We are witnessing the unprecedented and remarkable metamorphosis of an animal of everyday consumption into a table fruit well arranged on a pretty waxed tablecloth.

As for the wolves, bears, big deer, hyenas and other legendary beasts, they are well aware that their time is limited. Sometimes they kill each other out of necessity, but they find it much more energy-efficient to take a few samples from the tamed herd, which they know is parked not far from the cities. The attacks on their ex-congeners are lightning fast; often they fail, but one time out of ten, they effectively put a strain on the locked food reserves, be they sheep or cereal. For even more than against calculating humans, it is towards those grazing, greedily pouring over their soil, that the saving raids must be directed. To deal the coup de grâce to a usurping artist is to deprive the national farmer of his pittance and to damage his system of intensive production of joyful creators.

You who perhaps recognise yourselves, as rare and endangered as you are, in these still lucid felines, in these proudly crop-destroying pachyderms, I beg you, kill from time to time, when the urge takes you, on the occasion of a makeshift vernissage or a convivially organised premiere, a fake artist, for the pleasure of unravelling the construction chain of budding bourgeois gifted for communication.

You will find in its flesh, though it will be considerably starved, enough mineral salts to at least help you get through the winter, satisfied with your work. Steal, pillage, trample, slaughter, if only for the sensation of living; take by the throat, as soon as the opportunity arises, one of those servile creatures who have unlearned to express their rage and their truth in the name of a cheap ethic of a butcher's animal. Get off its degenerate brain; don't hesitate to show yourself a scavenger towards those you feel are already copiously squared off by the system. The heavy gaze, the panting breath and the blood in the corners of your mouths, these are the reliable signals that, at random encounters, will sometimes indicate that we should be recognised. Warmed up by these winks to our legitimate existences, we will thus learn in the future to make more victims among the strays of these transhumances without subject and give space to our own looks.

And if one day, one of us, by some miracle and without too many basenesses, manages to topping the charts... that the benefit to us is great...! ... as long as, devoid of the slightest scruples, the instinct is kept alive in us, not to procreate or to reproduce according to the model of another, but to instil our own genome everywhere, without worrying about the hecatomb that it could happily cause by its poisonous ingestion. Brothers and sisters of the jungle, if you exist at all, let us leave to humans their imbecilic honour, the offspring of their vanity, and in a common lack of ethics, let us survive, as long as it is possible, to harm them and to exist.