OF OUR ARTIFICIALITY

The world which surrounds us, and which results, for the large part, from human activities, is nature in which we evolve. It leads to, in return, a large part of our behaviour and thoughts. If it were different, then we would behave and think differently, a little like the two-dimensional beings from the famous work of Edwin Abbott, Flatland, published in 1884, whose universe and gods ensued from the perception of a space limited in length and breadth.

Not only does art give a varied commentary on nature which really exists, an invented reality and our fantasies about it, it also adds an extra dimension to this, which serves to both enrich it and give it a concrete, sensitive, aesthetic form. Art is a device which contains the artificiality of the world. When Kimsooja unfurls the materials – which in her country of origin often accompany people throughout their lives and which have become for others the very emblem of the immigrant or the nomad – and makes them endlessly glow, she offers the viewer the possibility of immediately grasping a far-away reality in which he participates, despite himself: innocence only exists for ignoramuses and those of a simple mind. Or even, when Tina Gillen paints a series of stylised houses, not only does she refer to the now global spread of the standard dwelling, she also makes this notion palpable, immediately comprehensible, as if the beautiful painting were a more convincing proof than a documented report.

But there is also the evocation of the urban jungle and its legends by Damien Deroubaix, the precision of the rendering of spatial organisation of a postal sorting by Andreas Gursky, the nocturnal reverie of a fun fair by Bruno Baltzer or the cruel juxtaposition of lies at the service of criminal ideologies ("Arbeit macht frei") and of the manufacture of infantile entertainment (Walt Disney) by Claude Lévêque.

Art can sometimes be the revelation of the impensé of a society.

_{(1) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Foreword to the 1946 edition}