The protocol for the production of the works presented at Salon du Salon is simple. There is a certain nonchalance, few gestures. These gestures directly question how a work is produced. The stages of development of these works are predefined: visiting museums, taking photographs, opening them on a computer, copying, pasting, adjusting, moving and recording. The same protocol is applied to sculptures: looking for models of works of art, downloading them, opening them on a computer, copying, pasting, adjusting, moving and recording. The finalized digital document is then sent via the internet for printing. Once received, its elements are arranged and displayed. My task is to keep the machine running, to test my method, to extend it and to accept the hazards of improvisation, chaos and surprise. The forms produced would have what Tristan Garcia calls an equal ontological dignity.
« We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things. »*
In addition to this drift in the museum rooms, there is a drift on the many websites that offer models, files of digitised works. This monstrous, distorted approach represents both a way of proceeding and a principle of equality. Everything is reduced to a relation to forms, remains elusive. It is difficult to establish substantive relations between these forms, but there is something that connects them. A certain desire, a willingness, a need projected in the use or contemplation of the object, the gesture, the icon. These works and these attitudes embody the same joyful and inoperative melancholy in the world. Beyond the meaning that can be extracted from it, this process questions copying, documentation and capture. Understanding, creating, citing, using, deforming, destroying; copying and pasting; acting, drifting too.
This set of works takes a precise and critical look at what computing is changing in our way of thinking and understanding the world. It is a question of experimenting with a whole system of possible operations carried out with an unfailing form of love for things, gestures and beings.
This publication is both a synthesis and an extension of these issues.
Qu’il est bon
de se réveiller le matin
tout seul
et de se dire de l’art
que vous l’aimez
que vous l’aimez plus que tout
au monde.**
- Michaël Sellam, Paris, September 2019.
*: Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 1.
**: Freely inspired by: « Love Poem » by Richard Brautigan.
GRAPHIC CONCEPTION : MICHAËL SELLAM & PHILIPPE MUNDA
JACKET / SOFT COVER / 60 PAGES / 9 COLOR INSERTS
EDITION OF 500 COPIES
JANUARY 2022
ISBN 978-2-9552776-2-1
EDITION SALON DU SALON 2021
