...the eternal return to reason by Michèle Debat

H.F., or, the eternal return to reason

"What is good, if it is brief, is twice as good."
Baltasar Gracian


At first sight, matter reigns. Henri Foucault's studio, somewhere in a de-urbanised neighbourhood – a cross between a collective habitat with no architecture and a warehouse complex with no function – gives one the feeling of having stumbled on a collection of scenery for abstract theatre, or perhaps a hive of craft activity (which in reality produces no usable objects). There is an impression of matter (a type of matter that conveys much of its own substance) putting itself forward placidly, as matter alone is capable of doing.
Older sculptures (dating from the time when Foucault was indeed a sculptor), which I only ever saw in a dismantled state, wrapped up for storage, tidied away, re-tidied away: pieces of wood or painted polystyrene that suggested metal pilasters and colonnades, but whose individual forms were drawn from the repertoire of gears, toothed wheels, marine engines, or science-fiction non-mechanical machines. Right away, there is a striking relationship to matter and form. It is something that both carries weight and does not carry weight: tonnes, for the eye, and at the same time a feeling that one could lift the thing with no effort (I haven't actually tried). It is both admitted and denied, ponderable but unnamable, indescribable, uncheckable. With regard to appearance, it plays on an ambiguity (which H.F. seems to relish) between the mechanical and the monumental, the functional and the abstract.
In all of Foucault's work, such as I know it, I find this same duplicity of matter and material (and also form). To begin with, there is everything that derives from sculpture, and the old debate between the via di porre and the forza di levare, between modelling and the chisel. Foucault tells us he started out a modeller. He had an excuse: he was modelling (already, improbably) geometrical forms. But in general he did less modelling or chiselling than sawing, cutting, threading, sanding, arranging, adjusting, fastening, glueing, nailing or attaching, in other words actions of the hand that do not aim at attacking matter directly, but are nonetheless manipulations. Looking at these non-sculpted sculptures, one is always aware of the initial amount of matter, its nature, and its propensity to weigh, to be cut out and exhibited on the ground or on a wall. This is the most fundamental legacy of sculpture and its theory: it is the artist who imposes form on a certain type of material, manually probing its qualities. However magisterial, however far removed from the contingency of tools, however cerebral or Platonic a sculptor may be, he knows he must count on his hands (or his ten fingers), and that he also has to come to terms with matter – its virtualities and resistances, its compliances and limits.
A list (no doubt incomplete) of materials. Plywood, with or without polystyrene: Box (1990), Par le haut (1998), Sur le bord (1998). Cardboard and lead: S.O.U.L. (1990). Blotting paper: Collage (1994). Soft pink, almond green, blue or yellow – the colours of industrial rag paper, a soft, difficult material (above all, do not scratch, do not stain; and avoid creasing). Household adhesive, such as Vénilia: Signe(s) des temps (1999), a patchwork (highly geometrical, as always) of triangles and rectangles stuck together edge to edge on a paper backing. Binding paper or skai, for the framing of the photo series Coquillages (2000). A whole range of metals, including lead, and generally matt, but rarely (never?) given form – used, rather, in that subordinate part of the work which is the frame (though the frame, in a piece by H.F., is not just something subordinate). Finally, as a deeper sign of the thinking process, or the intention that subtends these choices, there is the omnipresence of a mundane, exceptional material – what the artist calls "photograms", namely photographic paper exposed to light, then developed. (And I am deliberately overlooking the clay and plaster used in the earliest works, with which I am not familiar.)
The experience of form – quadrangles, circles, geometrical structures, scatterings of points, constellations of spots – is fundamental to all this, with the proviso that it should always be a material form, a form of matter; that form should take on an appearance which is first of all smooth or rough, light or heavy, spongy or filmy; and that one should be able to find tactility in it. There are photographs which show that Sur le bord began with an outline drawn directly on the white wall of the studio with a thick marker pen; then seven anchoring points were selected, like giant nails made of aluminium, lead or wood (not counting the steel screws), so that the labile character of the inscription, arbitrarily corrigible, was in effect corrected, and self-imposed rules were laid down, banishing all caprice and ensuring tangibility, tactile materiality. The form was able to wind its way among these immobile nails; the line could be erased and reappear; the work had attained a fixed state. Now finished, it also comprised another anchoring, this time formal rather than material – the black and beige chequered pattern which has long been one of Foucault's obsessions, or rather one of his certainties. (Some years ago, talking to me about the Secret Life series [1997], he said that he had begun by "choosing a base" – the chequerboard structure that surrounded the portraits. A visual base? I think not: a material base, or rather terrestrial, and at the same time conceptual. And there you have it: "matter plus idea" sums him up.)
All the works that I know by Henri Foucault are strongly bound to their constituent materials, or their composition of materials, and are subject to determinants of form that solidify them still further, attaching them and anchoring them. Bitumen, pure and patinated metals, blotting paper, drawing paper, as in Figure (1993-9), photosensitive paper – all these materials are placed before the eye in a tactile mode, but also in a form that rules out any perception of a raw material, since organisation, regularity and geometry are the order of the day. Signe(s) des temps uses a plastic-coated fabric of the kind that replaces tiles in cheap or hasty kitchen design. Removed from its normal context, this poor man's material is worked on with sophistication, in an elaborate if childlike structure that runs through the range of elementary forms, though the material persists, imposing a good-natured, ironic, disjointed imagination (a cup of tea, a glass of red wine, a casual wipe of the sponge).

Then there is another Foucault, who is interested in machines and techniques, the cinema and video, and who has produced works similar to installations. There is no weighty matter this time, no tactility (even subterranean), but the usual features (abstract, by nature) of the installation: space, movement, light, time. His moving images (But is the moving image a material? No, neither a material nor a form, but an essence) are divided up between two types of historical consciousness that have often been regarded as incompatible. On one side there are the avant-gardists, and particularly those who, between Scriabin, the Corradini brothers and Moholy-Nagy, relived, revived, and sometimes dogmatised the old preoccupation with equivalences (whether sensorial or spiritual) between music and painting. On the other side there is film, which for H.F. means real cinema-going experience – that of the silver screen and the rolling credits – with cinema as the art of an era that is infinitely desynchronised in terms of any "phenomenology of the mind".
Moholy-Nagy's Licht-Raum-Modulator, for example, is an inevitable reference for the iridescent modulations of light that Foucault produced in Run (1998) and Tada Ima (1998). The musical allusions are not so immediate or direct as those of his forebears, but are implicitly constitutive of pieces that contain a rich harvest of coloured patches, lines and dots, visual dispersals – an agitation, an unease that is not pictorial in essence. One has to look towards very "contemporary" music, far from the colour-light correspondences of Scriabin's laws of harmony and counterpoint, far from Survage's elementary proposals (one colour, one sound; one form, one rhythm). Music for the eyes, as produced by Foucault's modulations of light, is stochastic, aiming not at harmony but events. It comes after Stockhausen, after John Cage, after Xenakis.
The cinema – that vast repertoire of culture; that stratification of emotions already felt; that machinery, now mythical – is not so immediately present in Foucault's work (because he has too much reverence for it, perhaps?). The films Vie secrète (2001) and Transport(s) (2002) are in the first instance the work of someone who is used to having a model before him, a body that is a pretext for the appearance of an image, as in the studio of a sculptor or a painter. There is no fiction in these films, any more than there is passion in the patheticised expressions of the models in the 1997 series of photographs and paintings Vie secrète / Secret Life. But in all of them there is a not-too-distant echo of another conception of the model, based on a belief in an essence (an "ontology", in André Bazin's sense) of the photographic image. The model is that which, in the end, will be expressive, sometimes very expressive, though not self-consciously or deliberately so. It does not express anything of itself, or indeed anything of the person for whom it poses; what it expresses, if anything, is its being-in-the-world, its being-there. Secret life: not a hidden life, with the artist as its hermeneuticist; but the very fact of being, of presence, as a secret (and one that is shared).
The different means of production or reproduction of images follow on one after the other as engineers' inventions, often disconnected from all utility or appropriateness. The latest revolution, that of the digital, has little in common with the cinematographic revolution (which opened up a whole new realm to feeling, imagination and thinking, whereas the main effect of the digital revolution has been to turn us into collectors of reified feelings). It is a technicians' revolution that feeds on itself: the digital makes it possible to store things "for all eternity", but the machines that make the digital into something other than strings of 0s and 1s never stop changing.
It is as an instinctive reaction to this headlong flight (yes, this is a man of instinct), and a profoundly political one, that Foucault always returns to solid ground. His pieces on the passage of time and the diaspora of events make use of the simplest, if not the most rudimentary, devices: small mirrors, prisms, much like what Goethe would have used to work out his colour theory (which these works bring to mind). As to his automaton images, in the end they are pure extrapolations from the progressive deviation of his activity as a sculptor, and continuations of his investigations into optical "touch". Vie secrète is a strange notebook in which he records the poses of a model he knows well and has often represented otherwise – as if it were a question of retaining a trace that differed completely from the photogram, which is paradoxically more "raw" because it cannot be reworked. There is a sort of dissociation between the power of sight and that of an armed vision of the hand. The same model, observed by the camera, classically yields a face, as in the cinema or in representative sculpture; when "treated" by the sculptor and the photographer, it yields an imprint of a body of light. In both types of treatment, what counted, and what counts, is the appearance of the image (as with the "satori" that gives one of the series of photograms its title), the revelation. It is no surprise that for the film-maker's sake the model has obligingly shed a tear, irreplaceable because it is unique: the cinema as "ontology" of appearance.
As a modality of the image, photography is older than the cinema, and, as we know, has actually very little to do with it, while sharing its present destiny and ineluctably changing before our very eyes with the spread of the digital image and its consequences, fortunate or unfortunate. Like you and me, Henri Foucault takes photographs of his family, and sends them to his friends in digital, virtual form. But Foucault the artist uses photography in its most archaic, and in particular its most material, its most "matter" variants. Niépce's Judaean bitumen was a heavy, opaque substance, as black as the blackest lampblack (which apparently served as an absolute, though abstract, reference in an early photographic process developed by a certain Hercule Florence); and both substances are infinitely material. For our bodies, to begin with, light is just a medium, a bath, a thing perhaps, but enveloping and intangible. Photography was born into the awareness of an almost unsustainable paradox: the ability of something as substantive as bitumen (or silver salts, or gum bichromate) to figure the part of the physical world that seems most resistant to comprehensibility as matter. In the photographers' jargon, is "contact" not what fills in something like an ontological lacuna, as indiciality without an imprint?
And this is what H.F. is talking about. He pretends to forget the vocation of photosensitive paper, but in reality he exaggerates it absolutely, cancelling it out or subverting it and restricting it to a minimum – white spaghetti or tangled bits of string seem to pass behind a mask (in the Spectres [1994] and Photogramme-inox [1992-4] series). The photographic paper, even with a silvery coating, is still paper; and in the imaginary economy of materials it enters into a relationship with blotting paper, adhesive- and plastic-coated paper, metals and wood. But there is another type of matter, invisible and intangible in itself. Photonic blackness is a material: this simple, provocative statement is an implicit lemma that has founded, and continues to found, a whole swathe of Foucault's work. Lumière noire (1998), his most explicit piece in this respect, alternates rectangles of tar paper and black photograms (all with aluminium frames), in a scandalous but limpid equation: "tar = photons".
He no longer emphasises this "genealogical" use of photographic blackness to the same extent; when he needs black light inscribed on paper, he simply takes it, and indicates the fact by including "photogram" in the list of materials. There again this might be thought of, and not without reason, as the acceptance of a legacy – that of Man Ray, at least. But Foucault does not use black photograms exclusively. Even without counting the slightly misleading, whimsical or ironic pieces such as Vous (1995) and Face-à-main (1997) – which are photograms only in the same way that medical images made with x-rays are photograms – a considerable part of his recent work uses images that inevitably bring to mind the 1926 film Retour à la raison on account of their variety: sprinklings of pins (or drawing pins) with Man Ray, webs of wire with Foucault, and, here and there, the imprint of a naked body.
The difference, of course – and it is considerable – is H.F.'s refusal to make any concession to the found (visual) object. He chooses, frames and composes these automaton images. He also transforms them, and to a significant extent remakes them (for him, "to make" is always synonymous with "to make by hand"). The large images of the Satori (2002-5) and Sosein (2000-5) series are rayograms, one might say, since they were obtained by having the naked body of the model pose (and repose) on photographic paper. The result, however, is anything but aleatory. Firstly, a strict selection process eliminates anything that photonic randomness may have got wrong – its inadequate proposals. The images are then subjected to a number of procedures that change their nature. Stamped, cut out, superimposed in several sliding layers, playing at being masks and counter-masks; in sum, treated in such a way as to give them a hand (Sosein); contradicted, taken beyond their two-dimensionality by fields of pins that confer on them a vibration, a space, a relief effect. (And in this manual task there is always a certainty that the effect obtained will be truly visual and concrete, not abstract.)

"DI, SEGN, O: with the three letters D, I and O, God is written and proffered […] Consequently, the name of God is something clear that denotes the creator, the maker of the universe, He who vivifies, nourishes, maintains and augments nature. Thus […] we shall say that the name disegno is both the sign of the name of God, as is clearly demonstrated by its letters and attested by its pronunciation, and the sign of another God, created, metaphorically speaking, out of another generative nature which forms, enlivens and sustains in us all science and all practice […]
Properties and qualities of the disegno:
[…] Quality: demarcation, measure and figure.
Definition: form of all forms, light of the intellect and life of operations."
It was not a sculptor who, in 1607, put forward this etymology worthy of Queneau's literary lunatics, but a painter. His fresco allegory, the Apotheosis of Drawing, can still be seen on the ceiling of the library in the Zuccaro building. And even God cannot act externally without, as Federico Zuccaro said, "contemplating and looking at the inner Disegno in which he sees in one glance everything he has done, is doing, and will do." Drawing is nothing other than the Idea itself, produced in the intellect – the most real of realities, which repels all time's assaults.
Idea. Structure. Elements. Combinations. Order. Ordering. Spectrum.
The Platonic and Aristotelian mantle in which the 17th-century theorist shrouded his discourse has disappeared (it is now, on the contrary, deification that bothers us). With Foucault, the premeditation of each piece, and even that of each element at each stage of each piece, is obvious – but it is the activity as a whole, its very nature, that seems to have been planned out at the start, at a stroke. As I have said: Henri Foucault's studio speaks volumes about his relationship to drawing. And yet one does not get any sense of a claim to world-building. There is no diegesis, no "possible world", as there is with the theorists of fiction. Indeed there is no fiction (well, not much); and thus, no creatures (in the sense of "things created").
The control, the intention, is of a different order – more elementary, and at the same time more intellectual, than that of narrative painters. The passion is that of the series, exhaustiveness, a total implementation of formal principles, an exploration of structures. Spectres, Vie secrète / Secret Life and Satori are series, in other words systematic works, done in the spirit of the system. Each singular image, before being produced, is thought out as part of a totality whose central principle it manifests, apprehends and varies, and in which it is subject to the laws of number (once again, the obsessive image of empty frames in the studio, into which the image must enter). The principle is always precise and meticulous, but it also has to allow of variation and supplementation; it has to be open. The Spectres are geometrically regular small round forms in square fields, united by pathways that are either visualised or implicit. There are circles, either white or black, streaked with white, black, grey or, in some versions, primary or secondary colours. They are descendants of the chromatic circles of the 1800s; small honeycomb networks; white whorls traversing black eyepieces; and, each time, the photogrammatic signature, the shining, empty black surface, in tiny portions. Phantoms of the colour system, or, more distantly but more magically still, phantoms of the system of elements, images of atoms with their gravitation of electrons and their heavy nuclei: light, matter, and their spectrum.
Very different is the Vie secrète / Secret Life series, whose title and technique pull the imagination in quite another direction. Photographs of women's faces, reproductions of reproductions, photographs of a television screen, snapshots that catch expressions of ecstasy in flight. The work of the artist, the master of signs, consists of removing them from this screen but retrieving them on another, of a more or less regular structure, spherical and glassy, in a semi-transparent material that plays at simultaneously concealing and emphasising the obscenity of the mouths, the rolled-up eyes. The glass beads, or rather the small white circles that are their traces, are equivalents of the presiding structure of paving, or tiling, but with very different associations: clusters of transparent eyes without retinas, whose lenses and vitreous humour seem to occupy their entire volume. Secret life: voyeurism is precluded by the magnifying glasses that are supposed to concentrate it, while these thousand indifferent, voracious eyes obsessionally recall, even as they disseminate it, the photographer's prying eye. The terror that is etched on the faces makes this Foucault's most immediately expressive work (with ecstasy as a pathology, a necrosis of the skin, the faces). And at the same time it is subject, like the others, to regularity, the series, tiling.
The series as an obligatory aspect of intellectual certainty. Number is its simplest and crudest sign. The Spectres series, which according to the artist was taken to the point of (subjective) exhaustion, comprises an arithmetically remarkable number (30) of elements. A series, therefore, is not so much what is exhausted as what is saturated. If it is to exist, it must go a long way into a combinatory process which nonetheless leaves room for incompleteness. In Figure (1994-8), the arrangement of chromatic versions of an elementary form (a Latin cross) in saturated colours and small numbers is extreme in its regularity. And yet the installed work runs counter to this simplicity: the elements go in pairs, upsetting the relationship between form and content. But since there is an odd number of elements, the series cannot become saturated.

The studio, again. This is where the most important step – preparation – takes place, in the eyes of Foucault the draughtsman. But "studio" is also to be taken in the sense of "workshop". The sculptor, like the architect, thinks in terms of volumes. Both, in most cases, start by sketching out their thoughts. And I have always been amazed at the number of notebooks Foucault fills up before starting a work. The appearance, development and realisation of the idea are all there – theoretically, at least, because from the outside things naturally remain enigmatic. There are also the models and tentative versions (I have commented on Sur les bords), the montages and re-montages that attain their definitive form through trials and rectifications of "errors", and in this sense are analogous to the experimental method of "successive approximations". All in all, this approach is as typical of an architect as of a sculptor: the idea is there from the outset, and it guides the work of the hand, the body, the eye (Foucault's Michelangelesque side). But the idea does not pre-exist its precipitation in matter; it has to be experienced.
It is often as an emblem of this dialectic that I understand Foucault's tongue-in-cheek titles. Sur le bord ("On the edge") is a piece whose edges are nailed to the wall: Lumière noire ("Black light") is an assemblage of black photogram and tar paper rectangles, framed by aluminium; Par le haut ("Towards the top") is a vertical serpentine wood structure with a sort of cap that allows it, in a sense, to "hold up"; Au centre, 1997, juxtaposes six squares covered with adhesive strips, at 45° to the horizontal, with concentric circles of black photograms at their centres. But I will stop there: the principle is always the same in its falsely-naive redundancy. At the end of the line one finds the Photogramme-inox series, with photograms framed in stainless steel. The title expresses exactly what one sees; nothing more, nothing less. And here I cannot help thinking of Bustos Domecq's ironic fables, and their imaginary artists: Loomis, a writer whose readers "discover, with wonder, the rigorous coincidence [of the title and the content]: the title is the work"; Urbas, who, entering a poetry competition on the theme of the rose, "simply, triumphantly, submits a rose"; Lambkin, who, under the title The Divine Comedy, publishes an exegesis of Dante's poem which is in fact a long quotation from it, word for word. But of course I make a distinction between Foucault and this kind of pure nominalism, much like the distinction that applies (in line with a similar principle, however different in its modalities) to Michael Snow, whose frankly Duchampian irony is always concerned with preserving sensorial experience.
Foucault would be a conceptual artist if he did not have so much time for his fingers, and so much respect for the viewer's eye. More radically, what sets this intellectual, this man of drawing and ideas, apart from conceptual art, is elementary: matter. One may think of a work entitled Photogramme-inox or Lumière noire, but one still has to execute it with one's hands, one's eyes, and the rest (and as I have said, Foucault makes everything himself, including the frames; only the mounting is done by others). A work is not consummated in the mind, and it does not force the viewer to imagine it, or to make it. A work is made – really made – when it addresses me, and when I receive it with this making. The recent Satori and Sosein series exemplify this: a series is the offspring of an idea, a disegno – an automaton bodily imprint – but it exists, and is embodied (its body; this body as an image and a work), only through a second action, which is highly manual. Pushing pins, punching holes: these are simple, repetitive, tirelessly monotonous activities which the artist carries out himself despite (or perhaps because of) the monotony. One has to be there. The hand has to be there when the work is being done, in other words when the idea and the intention cease to be abstract and don their costume of matter. (But I will leave it there. Elsewhere in the present volume, Dominique Païni explains precisely how this action brings photography into contact with sculpture. And I have no comments to make, on this point – except, perhaps, to recall that the role of the hand is identical for the Spectres and the Photogrammes, bending wire and placing it on photosensitive paper.)

I would just add two minor remarks (but they are quite important, I feel). Firstly, as a correction to what may have been an over-theoretical aspect of my description, it is true that drawing, even objectified, results in works whose charm is not guaranteed (as witnessed by the amount of contemporary art that was not thought out beyond the project stage). Foucault, as I have said, is of this earth. He knows that we find our greatest enjoyment in the terrestrial; and his obstinacy in seeking out, acclimatising, varying and working on materials is also (and often, to my mind, essentially) intended to make them available to us in a way that is conducive to pleasure. The Secret Life series tortures the eye with its improbable exchanges between painted chequerboards and photographed structures of glaucous circles – but this is a delicious torture which informs the semi-dissimulated ecstasy of the (semi-dissimulated) model, and its pathos. The seductiveness of the Satori is immediate; the forests of small pins vibrate in the ambient light, ravishing the eye with a tactile, full, calm, tense sensation. Everything, including the Photogramme-inox series in the apparently random arabesques of their convolutions (in reality they are deliberate, crushed between the photographic paper and a glass plate), exudes a simple charm. As with any aesthetic experience, this one is difficult to communicate: it merely needs to be named, to have its necessary ordeal enunciated, to be identified as consubstantial with the whole work.
The other remark is perhaps very similar, but it takes a different viewpoint. In all that I know about Foucault's art (finished works and pieces, notebooks and preparatory models, books, conversations) there is an unswerving principle of economy, almost brevity. No small talk, no wasted words, no adiposity. One always remains with (or rather, one always attains) a dry, clear, precise state of the work. The purpose of the perfected form, in which principles are uppermost, is not to stifle emotion or to direct it (one may find oneself drifting into a dream in front of these works), but to prevent it from wandering, and to sharpen its concentration, its economy, its clarity. It seems to me that "economy of charm" (almost an oxymoron), like the dialectic of drawing and the hand, is a fitting definition of Henri Foucault's highly distinctive art.

Michèle Debat