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art painter painting animal insect punishment religion dogma pope history modernity representation critic time sacrifice gift

✖ Via Marc Séguin: “Infallibility - Pius X”,oil, charcoal, crows feet & butterflies on canvas, 2008

About Marc Séguin:

Originally from Ottawa, Marc Séguin lives and works between Montreal and New York. Since his first solo exhibition in 1996, his work has been presented in Madrid, Barcelona, Venice, Berlin, Cologne, Brussels, New York, Chicago and Florida while participating in international art fairs such as the Miami Basel. He is currently represented by several galleries including Corkin Gallery in Toronto as well as Envoy Gallery in New York. (Bio)

Art takes time. It takes time to create, and it takes time to experiment as well. If the artist creates himself while he paints, I guess the spectator creates himself while he takes some time to examine a piece of art. Or maybe it’s the other way around. One doesn’t take the time to watch a film or read a book : rather, one gives some of his time to experiment with a piece of art (DeLillo plays with this idea when he writes about Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hours Psycho). Maybe art has something to do with a dance between sacrifice and gift : one sacrifices a part of his life and, in return, is given the gift of himself through artistic journeys.

Here’s an example. Just quickly surfing the web, browsing through hundreds of pictures, one would missed the fact that the above painting was created with tar, real feathers and real butterflies (all glued to the canvas). The painting is huge : the crow hanging from the Pope’s necklace is real.

Here’s an excerpt from a 2008 interview with Marc Séguin:

In addition to the road kill series you have the pope series. Is there a correlation between the two of them besides the material that you use?

Maybe. I’m really too close to all these series to reflect on it, or it’s for people like you to find a link. I’m sure it makes sense somewhere, with the use of the use of the symbol of the crow, with the idea of infallibility of the pope in the Roman Catholic Church. There’s questions there, because in that way it addresses serious issues.

Serious issues being what?

Infallibility, or the fact that we’re living in this era where we can’t question what the Roman Catholic church does, but we can question what the Quran says or what the Muslim people do, or the Buddhists or what the Chinese do, but we never question ourselves. Dogma is a very dangerous thing. They’re supposed to stand for modesty, poverty, and whatever, and here they are—posing like peacocks. They’re blown up as these big statues, presenting themselves as bigger than life, or more important than their subjects.

And here they’re tarred and feathered.

They’re tarred and feathered because it was a way, back in the old days, to tell when somebody was wrong. They’d turn them out of the city and they could be recognized for months or years, because they were tarred and feathered. (NY Art Beat: “Death Becomes Him: The Art of Marc Seguin” by Amanda Scigaj, Oct. 29th, 2008)

See more of his work at the Simon Blais Gallery (Montreal) and Charest-Weinberg Gallery (Miami). The Canadian Art website has a slideshow about recent paintings by Marc Séguin.

• Sep 12, 2010 link notes tagged: art painter painting animal insect punishment religion dogma Pope history modernity representation critic time sacrifice gift

This paradox of the carnival—which in the most general sense is the paradox of emotion, but in the most specific sense is the paradox of sacrifice- ought to be considered with the most critical attention. As children, we have all suspected it:perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we “possess” this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves. Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.

✖ Via The Cruel Practice of Art (L’Art, exercice de la cruauté) by Georges Bataille, originally published in Médecine de France, June 1949, reprinted in Georges Bataille Oeuvres Complètes, vol. XI, Paris: Gallimard, 1988. English translation by Supervert.com, 2003. [PDF]

About Supervert.com :

If he were alive today, would the Marquis de Sade have a web site? (120 Days of Sodom, ancestor of the sex blog.) Would Charles Baudelaire employ venture capital for a sinister new internet startup, Fleurs du Mal Inc? Would Arthur Rimbaud use information technology to disorder the senses? Would any of them, were they alive today, find some way to advance literature by means of artificial intelligence?

Supervert is what an author can be when amplified by technology. Creator of books, web sites, and CD-ROMs, Supervert stands at the intersection of literature, technology, and perhaps also abnormal psychology — for in all its endeavors, Supervert utilizes the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to research the pathology of novel perversions. A sort of deviant Bauhaus, Supervert strives to create new experiences through the synthesis of art, technology, pornography, and philosophy. (more)

• Aug 07, 2010 link notes tagged: art literature Bataille paradox sacrifice carnival author book world representation order chaos apprehension trust mistrust anxiety childhood adulthood society community

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

✖ Via Guilty or The Guilty One (Le Coupable) by Georges Bataille, tr. Bruce Boone, The Lapis Press. [1944]1988.

• Aug 01, 2010 link notes reblogged from georgesbataille [via] tagged: art literature guilt destruction need self-destruction existence sacrifice expenditure lost intimacy Bataille

art communication book frontispiece engraving leviathan esposito communitas freud father son murder violence death sacrifice

✖ Via Wikimedia Commons: book frontispiece by Abraham Bosse for Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651). It was created with input from Hobbes. [click for hi-res]

Learn more about the frontispiece on wikipedia.

Here’s another way to interpret this illustration:

The incorporation of the father on the part of the sons corresponds to the incorporation of the sons of the part of which, upon the death of the father, substitutes for him. What else does the celebrated image of the Leviathan represent, composed as it is of many small human forms wedged in together one against the other in the shape of a scale of impenetrable armor, if not the inclusion again of the murderous sons on the part of the “second” father in one’s own body? (Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community by Roberto Esposito, trans. by Thimothy Campbell, Standford: Stanford University Press, [1998]2010, p. 40)

• Jul 09, 2010 link notes tagged: art communication book frontispiece engraving Leviathan Esposito communitas Freud father son murder violence death sacrifice

One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion.

✖ Via Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud, tr. Abraham Arden Brill, New York, Moffat, Yard and company, [1913]1919.

Previously on Skandalon: Freud

• Jul 09, 2010 link notes tagged: communication community hord father son parricide murder sacrifice death destruction life sacred violence society Freud psychoanalysis book author moral religion art totem taboo

The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.

✖ Via Violence and the sacred by Rene Girard, tr. Patrick Gregory, Continuum International Publishing Group, [1972]2005 p. 8

Original French text:

C’est la communauté entière que le sacrifice protège de sa propre violence, c’est la communauté entière qu’il détourne vers des victimes qui lui sont extérieures. Le sacrifice polarise sur la victime des germes de dissension partout répandus et il les dissipe en leur proposant un assouvissement partiel. (éd. Bernard Grasset, coll. Hschette Littérature / Pluriel, Paris, [1972]1998, p. 18

Consider this for example. It doesn’t really matter (for what’s at stake here) if it’s true or not. What matter is that some people find it necessary to see McChrystal resignation as a sacrifice and are representing that belief by their talkings and writings:

Respected conservative Toby Harden of the UK Telegraph notes: “the way Obama fired McChrystal was choreographed to humiliate the general and bolster the President’s credentials as a macho man. So much for ‘no drama Obama.’ The manner of the firing came dangerously close to putting political theatre and image-burnishing above the conduct of a war.” Mortified, dishonored, ruined? I think not. General McChrystal may no longer be commanding the troops in Afghanistan, but his act of valor may very well have won the war here at home. Army General Stanley McChrystal may have taken a bullet, but crawling through the trenches on his belly the wounded patriot managed to set off a warning flare alerting America it is presently under presidential siege. (American Thinker: “McChrystal’s sacrifice?” by Jeannie DeAngelis, June 24th, 2010)

Previously on Skandalon : Rene Girard, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal

• Jul 05, 2010 link notes tagged: communication sacrifice violence victim community sacred immunitas communitas Esposito protection order war McChrystal United-States news representation anxiety Girard

america simulacrum art cartoon celebrity critic culture decadence history illustration illustrator loser satire simulation star sacrifice

✖ Via The New York Times: illustration by Barry Blitt for the od-ed column “Tiger Woods, Person of the Year” by Frank Rich, Dec. 19, 2009.

Previously on Skandalon: Barry Blitt

• Mar 25, 2010 link notes tagged: America Simulacrum art cartoon celebrity critic culture decadence history illustration illustrator loser satire simulation star sacrifice

Whatever fortunes our activity might have known, it was Potlatch alone that filled the void in the cultural ideas of an era — that gaping hole in the middle of the 1950’s. It is already certain that history will see it not as a witness to the fidelity of the modern spirit during the reign of reactionary parody, but as a document of the experimental research that would be the central concern of the future. But this future is now — it is the game of every one of our lives. The real success that may be attributed to Potlatch is in its serving to unite the situationist movement on a new and greater field of operations.

Potlatch took its name from the North American Indian word for a pre-commercial form of circulation of goods, founded on the reciprocity of sumptuous gifts. The non-salable goods which such a free bulletin could distribute were desires and unedited problems; and it was their profundity for others that constituted a gift in return.

✖ Via DEBORD, Guy (1959). «The Role of Potlatch, Then and Now», Potlatch, no 30, July 15. Translated from the French by Reuben Keehan.

About the site where this translation is hosted: «NOT BORED! is an autonomous, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal.»

Potlatch, as a circulation ritual (studied by Marcel Mauss), can be used to offer a different understanding of communication process. See Bataille (1933), Debord (1954) et Baudrillard (1972).

• Nov 30, 2009 link notes tagged: communication author sacrifice theory media critic philosophy game play power