Maxime Le Bon What you see

What you see

Part One. The streets are beginning to empty. No one can know whether this is linked to recent events, or to a more discreet upheaval taking place within people’s homes. A secret rumour beginning to grow in volume and breadth. We wouldn’t say that everyone is talking about nothing but this; and yet, it is a kind of white noise that registers, clears a wide field, passes over the pavements and through certain shop windows.

Perhaps it began in Saint-Gilles, one early evening, whilst leafing through artists’ books and other rare publications laid out on the coffee table in a living room. In search of a legendary artist (let’s avoid gossip, though), who is said to have sent his Parisian gallery packing because it had become too cool. That and other things.

It is not easy to disentangle fact from fiction; they are interchangeable, adaptable to many other timelines (let’s not spoil our fun). It is a reflection of the times. We take that seriously, you understand. Perfectly, perfectly. Supposedly for the love of the surface. I have nothing to say. Like Gladys Clover, there are many days when I would simply like not to open my mouth, or even to be seen by anyone else. One of these days, I would like to go to a restaurant wearing sunglasses. I will look at the wall to think; if only the wall, just like the world, would leave me alone, everything would be simpler.

But that is only half true. Even the act of disappearing summons a desire to be seen. Both present and absent, he could whisper three words in a corner and, in the end, no one would forget him. And while I shape my appearance like a silhouette, I tell myself that, for Gladys Clover, not being there was the way to be effective. I am empty and I love this superficiality. When one goes so far as to say that texts, after all, merely guide the recipient’s gaze in turn, just as the operators of the art-viewing apparatus do, which the work is supposed to critique, one is mistaken, of course.

These operators usually serve to make others see, not to be seen themselves. They simply belong to this operation.

This practice of neither producing nor issuing a press release stemmed, according to Manzoni’s explanation, from the position that there is a very brief window of time during which the visual work of art is experienced, before this perception is inevitably shaped by language, and that this window should be kept open for as long as possible; that we should resist prematurely foreclosing the meaning derived from the visual, resisting for as long as possible the channelling of the viewer’s experience through the structures of language.