about
The Flesh is a set of artist’s book created and published annualy since 2008 by Yann Géraud and Damien Mazières with the purpose to print, to give to read or to study groups of texts, images, reproductions or facsimiles, without previously considering its use value.
These artist’s books take the shape of a magazine. Filled with the will to spread thoughts without hierarchy or authority, the magazine’s space de nes itself for us like a space manifesto, meaning the location of the proclamation, the location of the things’ vision. The Flesh proposes a concretely abstract gaze. Filled with the desire to be an object, a printed thing, the magazine invests fields as broad as they are distant, an idea more often than not being better illuminated by its opposite than by its equivalent.
The magazine’s space could be described according to Patricia Falguières’ words in her preface to Brian O’Doherty’s White Cube. L’Espace de la galerie et son idéologie: “The four essays that Brian O’Doherty published in Artforum between 1976 and 1981, and that were then gathered under the collective title Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of The Gallery Space,do constitute one of the most beautiful black boxes for artists, critics, curators and collectors. In research laboratories, we named thus system whose exchanges are studied but without ever sounding out their content or intern gear mode. Like a transistor, an algorithm or a seal computer program, all you need to know is what goes in and what goes out: once connected, the black boxe will run the current research programs...”.
It is an ambiguous generosity that is described here, constituted by a mechanized, motorized void ready to receive the intelligence, the icon, the sign. If The Flesh’s editorial space doesn’t open onto anything else than what could be put inside, then it can only be rich with what’s accompanied. It is in a way a demonstrative adjective or a shifter, as demonstrates Rosalind Krauss in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths: «The shifter is Jakobson’s term for that category of linguistic sign which is “filled with signication” only because it is “empty”. The word ‘this’ is such a sign, waiting each time it is invoked for its referent to be supplied. “This chair”, “this table”, “this...” and we point to something lying on the desk”. If within the framework of an artistic exercise the object cannot be exhibited without being decontextualized, then it will be indexed. The index is a sign or a representation referring to its object. For example, we are not looking at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty but at its photography, its print, its indexing. The shifter accompanying the index, the context will designate the art; the gallery’s space will designate what makes the artwork.»
The book as the medium for an artwork is important to us, because the artist’s books are a bypath and an artistic practice. Regarded as a collective artwork, they question the usual system of production and mediation due to their light and mobile shape and their predisposition to go in front of the audience, where they would be not expected.
