by Bertrand Peret

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Road paintings

The device is simple: one has just to place a camera on the dashboard of a car - turning it on the inside  - and take photos.

When in 1995  I started taking photos in this way I did not have any precise idea of why or what I was taking them , all the more so as I hardly cared about the quality of these pictures.
Yet what was but a sort of game in the beginning gradually turned into a reflex, photographic exercise whose aim  was to archive the faces of those who were sharing my journey. All of the snapshots of privileged moments in time along the way, rather like some autobiography through photos taken inside my car.
In a few years, I had gathered a few hundred photos. I had a collection both rich and worth exploiting.
Behond the strictly personal dimension of those testimonies, the idea of collecting several entities within the limits of a same space, a car microcosm in that case, gradually openned up into an interesting  reflection on art and painting in particular.

I could sum up my work as being a gathering of experiences of different forms of life spaces, the canevas as a place of cohabitation for subjects, shapes and colors, and the exhibition or say the artistic event as a meeting place for art and life, because « this organic link between art and environment in which it was born is so loaded with meaning and so necessary that isolating one from the other would lead to all but abortion » (Allan Kaprow, Art and life intertwind).

We sailed and flew across the Atlantic ocean, then crossed the American continent from east to west rushing for gold and there we unloaded all the weight of our culture as we would put down heavy luggage after a long journey. Our civilisation stopped there, weary and enthusiastic at the border of the Pacific ocean. Cities sprung up and our culture was getting loose.

Los Angeles then expanded and turned into a boundless laboratory exploring human identity and collective conciousness by dream manufacturing.

That city of angels where people can disappear unnoticed as Bret Easton Ellis says, writting Less than zero with much source bitterness than John Fante watching his stupid dog.
Charlie Chaplin was one of the very first at the cinema in Rush for gold to highlight the perversity of that utopia, of that fascinated quest for Wonderland, Brave new world. Long before Easy Rider, Rush for gold imagines the road movie too, a cinematographic genre which ideally incarnates the idea of disillusioned itinerary, in which the strength and weaknesses of the people in quest for an imaginary and often unconcious grail are revealed in these lives of nomads travelling the world. Through the wandering of three hungarian émigrés, in his film Stranger than paradise Jim Jarmush emphasizes what I would call « disangelment », that feeling that angels would have lost their wings, why not in L.A ?

But then what are culture and beliefs to do if these angels, those divine intermediaires have lost their power ?
Something like the disquieting mood of the hangover after party, such as is found in Claude Lévêque’s installations who highlights   that desolation by switching nostalgic lights on abandoned indistrualised areas and the scum of our fantasms. A feeling of desolation pushed up till disgust or an urge for the murder and the rape of those beliefs and myths in Paul Mac Carty’s actions.

In 1998 I spent one year in residence in Nice, at Villa Arson, thinking about light. I made and exhibited rather rough luminory sculptures, installed so as to create a wandering space. One of the pieces I exhibited was a torn cardboard box filled with some fifty neon tubes but only one of them, covered with yellow gelatine, was lit up. That box seemed to have been stranded there and discarded as one would discard and push away old things, old unachieved, dead dreams into the corner of a room or of one’s memory, dreams one no longer thinks they could come through but that would still hold their part of mystery.

« Indeed the only interesting thing is the way people go. The tragic side is that once you know where they go and where they are, mystery remains unrevealed », Jean-Luc Godard says when he directs Pierrot le fou.

Doesn’t Icarus know that as he goes nearer the sun his wax wings will met away and he will die for standing up to his father Dedalius’s advice ? He does, yet he goes ahead.
It is the same hopeless romanticism which eggs on Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, Butch Cassidy and the Kid, that strange paradox which puches them and swirls them away through heroic and libertory rides until death. There is no way. They know it, yet they go ahead.
However the myth of Icarus cannot be summed up by this idealistic quest. One must bear in mind the fact  that, by trying to find a means to fly, which actually does work, Icarus uses new technologies. He does experiments, and experimenting is the fondamental process of creation for the artist as well as for the scientist.​ When in 1996 I had a first exhibition of my works in my flat I questionned myself on the idea of the context of « showing », that is how one’s work could cohabit with the place and the audience it could draw.
I went on this kind of experiment, inviting other artists to invade this space of life freely in their turn, and asking them  to take into account this unusual context in their production : those exhibitions were particular in so far as they lasted for 3 days and 3 nights, mingling art and festive celebrations.
By concentrating an artistic events in a definitive spatio-temporal frame, I conjure up the idea, however nonsensical, of a 3 dimensioned painting where the work, the place and the audience would be part and parcel of the making of some sort of total and short-lived art.
In 2000 and 2001 I set up two artistic events in Bordeaux with a few scores of artists, inspired by those exhibitions in a flat – 3 days and 3 nights without stopping. That time taking over different place in the city : museums, galleries, flats, squats, cinemas, restaurants, cafés or shops. I had in mind but on a larger scale the idea of collective work as a prototype of a temporary way of life.

Let us remember Traffic, the exhibition organised in the capc by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1996. It lasted for two months : was it not too long ? The theory of relational esthetism had its full meaning in a short span of time, when the artists, the management staff, the assistants and the audience met and mixed to create art, but as that exhibition lasted it was just another exhibition of contemporary art and the pieces of work themselves lost both efficience and consistency.

Indeed one must have a look at techno, more specifically the movement of freeparties and tecknivals set up by English travellers to observe the most interesting answer to the proposition of total art, or, as Hakim Bey names it of a TAZ, a temporary autonomy zone, « utopic in so far as it believes in the intensification of everyday life, or, as surrealists would have put it, a penetration of life by the marvellous.
By moving along this borderline where life and art meet, painting allows thus to fix this utopism in timeless spaces, in autonomy zones which invite people to feel the poetical power which urges man on to build and the artist to create, but mostly let people think that art can still change the world.

A few people got into my car ; I took photos of them while driving. I scanned some of these photos and worked on them again with Photoshop. Out of this work on computer I got other pictures I used to paint. I painted large canvases with oil. I have called them « Road Paintings ».

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