by Vincent Simon
in Catalogue Panic Raide, 2008
There's something of a break in the genesis of this work. Thus the two words presiding over its invention. Placed at the opening of this book, they are given as retrospective indications (expressing the artists' impressions after their visit to the place where the work is to be exhibited) and prospective indications (relating to what the work itself will be). Fluidity and drapery seem to have been abandoned insofar as no images of either are to be found. This is because they are names for the work. They don't define it, nor do they refer to it, but they give two possible meanings, like indications addressed to the public, as does the title.
These names - “fluidity”, “drape”, “Panic Raide” - surround the work. They create an atmosphere in which the work announces itself. It can contradict or dialogue with them. The predominantly horizontal structure of napalm-green painted wood, along which the other pieces are organized, is like the line of force of Panic Raide, with its angles and breaks, seeming to respond to the folded to the draped, paper to fabric, violence to nature, East to West. Similarly, the arrangement of the paintings, copies of fractal images, can be described as a fan, a device testifying to a specifically Eastern dynamic art of the fold, giving rise to an object of pleasure or combat.
We call Panic Raide a machine - a machine of machines. Each of its pieces is autonomous and functions only as part of the overall arrangement of the machine, which in turn functions by connecting with other arrangements. His pieces are the paintings, sculptures, objects, cartoons, posters and names with which the artists parent the piece, presenting it to the public in a cloud that doesn't explain it, but accompanies it. In this complex machine, the names create lines to be followed in two opposite directions, either towards the piece or towards its exterior. Panic Raide is originally a formidable name, half English, half French, evoking the fear aroused by an unknown event, the Greek god symbolizing nature as a totality, the erection of a limb or the state of a drunken man, the name given to a grass plant whose cultivation and processing is said to be capable of producing bio-ethanol at maximum profitability. The battalion of wine funnels planted at one point in the room would function here as the junction point between this possible energy and the work-machine, a battalion of mouths through which it feeds itself, absorbing this alcohol to irrigate its parts.
Yann Géraud and Georges Tony Stoll work like filmmakers, cutting and editing. The work is made up of heterogeneous elements assembled on the bench (the assembly line?) of the guiding structure, which can be seen as a cutout in a potential continuum. Indeed, the green-painted wooden structure has a beginning and an end, but does not close. The doubled line it traces in space exceeds it and continues ad infinitum, following inflections that remain unknown. The result is a “three-dimensional film” structured by the lines of force of the assembled pieces and all the interstitial lines that pass between the planes, as well as all the potential lines that radiate from the actual lines. Rather than representing the explosion, Panic Raide practices it by presenting itself as a bundle of multiple forces registered on a plane of immanence. Each piece of the machine bears the mark of division and repetition. It can unfold its folds ad infinitum, through creative repetition. A poster, a mechanical copy of an ink drawing, coexisting an oval and a cube - or rather, the assembly of three quadrilaterals signifying it - irregularly; animated drawings repeating the same rudimentary movements ad infinitum; paintings copying the mathematical generation of fractal images, and so on.
Thus conceived, elaborated and functioning in the mode of exteriority - the arrangement of heterogeneous parts whose assembly creates an uncertain but determined totality - the work exists only through the outside and to the outside. Its abstraction works by keeping all the parts separate, leaving open the possibilities of circulation and creating spaces for the work of those who encounter it. If the work exists in this way only from the outside, it must be circumscribed. It has to be approached, encircled; observed rather than defined. Instead of being related to a model or an idea, it requires an empirical approach: to be approached from the outside and followed in the lines it traces, the echoes and connections it establishes between its parts, connections that are always open and likely to lead to new branches. It must therefore be the object of a quantitative investigation rather than a qualitative assessment, an investigation that will take the form of experimentation with the series of correspondences that can be spotted in Panic Raide.
Correspondences are repeated throughout the work. The broken line of the structure identified as a line of force is found in those along which the fractal images unfold, as well as in that of the fan-shaped device along which the paintings representing these images are hung. We can start with the helical shapes generated by certain fractals and work our way down the arc drawn by the fan of paintings, encountering the battalion of funnels whose inverted cones are designed to guide the liquid in a helical movement. At this point, a leap is made towards the animated film shown on a monitor which, in their desynchronization, shows four copies of a soft target whose irregular, concentric rings describe awkward circular movements.
It's worth pausing for a moment at this point: Panic Raide seems to be based on an optic of imprecision. The paintings based on fractal images are reminiscent of Kupka's optical research into disks, whirlpools, refraction, propagation and deformation of the same form in an aqueous medium, and similarly produce those misfires born of the hand and its fundamental imprecision. As for the soft targets, they remind us of Duchamp's roto reliefs. Precisely because of their perpetual failure to produce the optical illusion intended by such a device - to suggest the third dimension from the first two - they would rather evoke the misadventure of Duchamp's first glass plate rotary press, which exploded (literally) in the midst of the revolution, sending art back to the side of trial and error.
The random and therefore uncertain nature of the work, signalling the always possible irruption of an accident that will derail the machine or divert its course, outlines another possible route through the room: the slightly off-centre tricolour target with its approximate contours painted on a gold panel against the wall (which could just as well be a painting that has fallen off the wall) responds to the soft targets in revolution on the TV set, via the pantomime of Individu A, Individu B, scribbled shapes clearly trying to make contact and an abstract version of a burlesque duo, whose comic springs are the fall and the kick in the butt. This accident, which is repeated in different parts of the work, had already been encountered in the fractal structure, whose development is random, and in the action of the hand copying these fractals. The artist's hand is found further on, severed right down to the forearm, in two copies, and the cardboard boxes supporting the plan may well contain other copies. A multiple piece that leads the piece it's part of to an interpretative fork in the road. Is the artist selling his hand to the collector - and in more than one copy? Does he ironically reproduce the fetish cast of the hand of the great artist or author on display in certain historical museums? Is he cutting off his arm to punish him for his inability to achieve perfection? Does he realize the Duchampian metaphor: “I decided to cut off my hands”?
Panic Raide undoubtedly resists its environment, while at the same time feeding off it, as it works from within. With Panic Raide, resistance constitutes a relationship with the subject as other. It connects with our actuality, that of its making and then of its existence, in this mode, implying the refusal of commentary. Artists do not deliver a single point of view on the world, but a multiplicity of signs and forms that can echo one another. The work thus resists both commentary and the univocity and unification of meaning. In other words, it refuses both to be a commentary and to be itself the object of a commentary. It is not a beautiful organic interiority, signifying and subjective, in which the artists' point of view and the image of the world are articulated. It is both a machine and a living body, an assemblage of intelligent physical forms. It is a unit of production, born of the artists' alliance for work, and as such it does not invite the public to consumption, a passive mode of reception, but incites it to a new production, in the attempt to apprehend it. As an arrangement, it is connected to other arrangements. The work - and the responsibility of artists, in that only they can take on this work - lies in proposing new arrangements. It is clear from this that the work of art does not communicate, i.e. it does not deliver information about the state of the world, but works to keep the intelligence on the alert by constantly presenting it with new challenges.
If Panic Raide is a machine, it aims for no technical perfection, but rather assumes the infallibility of failure, and rejoices in it. Panic Raide presents itself as a broken line caught in a clumsy whirlpool, a motionless and silent machine, in places traversed by approximations of movement - in other words, a machine that demonstrates umour, in the sense of what Jacques Vaché meant (in a letter to André Breton written from the front in April 1917), “the sensation of theatrical (and joyless) uselessness of everything”. There's no question of her being “neo”, nevertheless, this is a work in which the spirit of Dada undeniably resurfaces. Dada was born during the First World War, and its laughter responded to the patriotic and bloody concert of nations by turning its back on it. Panic Raide isn't trying to be funny, she's laughing. The proof: she appears in an ancient temple. We are reminded of Picabia's statement in L'œil cacodylate (1921): “Art is everywhere, except with art dealers, and in the temples of Art, just as God is everywhere, except in churches”.