Like a common.
The Contemporary Workshop| N° d'inventaire | 26221 |
| Format | 16 x 20 |
| Détails | 236 p., color illustrations, paperback. |
| Publication | Strasbourg, 2023 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782850350924 |
Camille Saint-Jacques's notebooks explore the different dimensions—aesthetic, ethical, and political—of a way of thinking about art as a commonality. Emmanuel Pernoud summarizes their aim thus: "Being a painter is nothing. It's painting that counts—the verb instead of the subject. Painting is within everyone's reach, including painters." Such is the stubborn undercurrent of these texts and their muted indignation against an art world that would make painting a restricted access. This is the "Night of August 4" aspect of these free reflections: "art belongs to you." In painting, in writing, it is about reconnecting with the part of night that we carry within ourselves, which is at the same time the most singular, the strangest, and the most common thing. We should not fear "wild, instantaneous thought, unrelated to dialectical linearity, closer to a haggard dream where images collide in a fertile outpouring."
Writing for each fragment its age in Roman numerals as well as the day of the year in Arabic numerals, Camille Saint-Jacques clarifies and deploys over the days this idea of an open, common painting, which would no longer be the privilege of a few: "To think that painting is a personal affair that one can sign with one's own name is a fatal error. It has taken root in us for several centuries now, since the advent of a bourgeois subject who monopolizes everything, including these commons: nature, earth, water, air... which should be transformed into "goods", that is to say into values, into merchandise and properties offered for trade. We are suffocating because of this shopkeeping rapacity, and we are dying from the injustices it engenders. It's very simple, art is not a good. We work as we breathe. This does not give us the right to sign what happens any more than we can appropriate the air in our lungs on the pretext that we have inhaled it for a few seconds. Art is also a common thing. Art, like air, like water, is only what passes through us, what passes. Its appropriation is not only a lie, but violence done to the infinite community of beings and things.
Camille Saint-Jacques's notebooks explore the different dimensions—aesthetic, ethical, and political—of a way of thinking about art as a commonality. Emmanuel Pernoud summarizes their aim thus: "Being a painter is nothing. It's painting that counts—the verb instead of the subject. Painting is within everyone's reach, including painters." Such is the stubborn undercurrent of these texts and their muted indignation against an art world that would make painting a restricted access. This is the "Night of August 4" aspect of these free reflections: "art belongs to you." In painting, in writing, it is about reconnecting with the part of night that we carry within ourselves, which is at the same time the most singular, the strangest, and the most common thing. We should not fear "wild, instantaneous thought, unrelated to dialectical linearity, closer to a haggard dream where images collide in a fertile outpouring."
Writing for each fragment its age in Roman numerals as well as the day of the year in Arabic numerals, Camille Saint-Jacques clarifies and deploys over the days this idea of an open, common painting, which would no longer be the privilege of a few: "To think that painting is a personal affair that one can sign with one's own name is a fatal error. It has taken root in us for several centuries now, since the advent of a bourgeois subject who monopolizes everything, including these commons: nature, earth, water, air... which should be transformed into "goods", that is to say into values, into merchandise and properties offered for trade. We are suffocating because of this shopkeeping rapacity, and we are dying from the injustices it engenders. It's very simple, art is not a good. We work as we breathe. This does not give us the right to sign what happens any more than we can appropriate the air in our lungs on the pretext that we have inhaled it for a few seconds. Art is also a common thing. Art, like air, like water, is only what passes through us, what passes. Its appropriation is not only a lie, but violence done to the infinite community of beings and things.