Télécharger le pdf de la publication - Reynald Drouhin

accompanies net worlds, it leads to another slowness, a time
that would flow between the two extreme forms of artistic
temporality peculiar to the modern age.
If with Métaorigines, for example, the artist defines himself
as “receiver, organizer, and also sometimes actor” of his
plastic proposals, one may however question this median
position. Is it a manner of leveling the tutorial image of a
god-like author (all modern authors from Lautréamont to
Duchamp claim this leveling), or on the contrary, a form of
heightened narcissism (even while demeaning himself an
author continues exhibiting himself, all the more so that he
seems to be content with little, and he keeps on asserting
his presence in absentia, with a simple nominal gesture:
“this is a work of art, and to prove it I name this object as a
work and not by showing my expertise”). This is the reign of
seeing and an eye that can be seen, not manual dexterity.
These paradigms have accompanied the modern motion
and one could imagine at first glance that Reynald Drouhins’
working concept is a continuity of the aesthetic participationnists
of the last century, of works open to the net and to
interactivity. However this analysis would be reductive, it
wouldn’t take into account the singularity of Drouhin’s work,
and the capacity of this work to exist, resist and persist as a
work, meaning a collection of objects as “beings”. “Beings”
that would oppose the motion leading to their programmed
disappearance within the light skeins of the web by the insistent
gravity of their formal appearance. Drouhin explains this
by the fact that if he tolerates the disconnections required by
web art, these disconnections must occur gently, and appear
slowly as they disappear (as is the case with Rhizomes).
In this respect, his work is in the pure tradition of modern
nihilism. If modern nihilism is really the autoreflection of art
...................
Tous Ego,
Alteraction, 1996-98
in the event of it’s own Hegelian death. Arts’ celibate
machines would in this case bump against the obstacle of
their own solipsism. But they don’t become any less singular
beings, and as such reflect the projecting shadows of the
death of art. This death of art is no less incarnate in a particular
given appearance.
As was the case with Warhol (who by explaining the production
method of his types – the industrial manufacturing of
images, Warhols’ gesture does’nt only attempt a criticism of
mass media. He questions the singular beings which his
works also are, as an original series whose theme is serial
imagery, the confiscation of a “total mode” in standards).
This is again the case with Drouhin. And his work is also in this
respect, diametrically opposed to the utopia and messianic
visions typical of a certain “tradition” in electronic art.
Let’s remember, if we care to grasp the distinction between
this work and that of other participationnists, and also what
binds it to this tradition, were at first these modes.
Firstly, in Duchamp’s work, which following that of Raymond
Roussel originates as Rosalind Krauss 1 suggests, “from a
strict manner of automation of artistic processes. This
mechanization deprived the work of its usual source of
meaning. A traditional work, as Krauss notes, is like a
window through which the psychological spaces of the
creator and spectator communicate. Mechanizing an artistic
gesture obstructs this classical opening.”
Drouhin’s work also finds a model in the set of aesthetics
founded on constraining systems, like, for example,
Raymond Queneau’s poems or the use of certain mathematical
formulas peculiar to Oulipo.