excerpt
Preface
(p. 230-232)
By way of introduction to this book, I wanted to
set up what I call the stroll. To choose to treat
it in black and white is a way of expressing the
essential. It is an important part of Travail de
rivière. It has showcased the correspondences
between my research, my notebook and the work of
artists that forms its pedestal, its essential
foundations. Instead of words I preferred to deliver
an introduction in images. I chose to exchange the
words with Hélène Meisel.
Thus there is no introduction in the strict sense
of the term but rather a stroll in images and a simple
postface, so that the different readings of the
project remain possible, as they were in the exhibition
itself. Different hypotheses continue to
develop, just as different paths took shape for the
visitors who ranged over the show.
Before I mounted Le Travail de rivière in Ivry-sur-
Seine in 2009, I had written a kind of preface
in Geneva in 2007 with Les Roses de Jéricho (The
Roses of Jericho). Today the project enters
a new phase in Istanbul with The Garden of Forking
Paths.
The rose of Jericho is a fossil plant. An archaic
species from the Middle East, it soaks up water at
the first rainfall and comes back to life. To me it
suggests eternity and persistence.
The “work of the river” is a symbolic expression
that conjures up the shaping of raw materials and
the importance of the work done by water. The premise
of the show was to bring together the temporary
and hence fleeting collection of the show's curator.
A “collection of sand,” as Italo Calvino
writes: “ To assemble a collection the way one keeps
a diary, that is, a need to transform the flow of
one's own existence into a series of objects saved
from being scattered, or a series of written lines,
crystallized outside of the continuous flow of
thought.” The hint of the Wunderkammer, the cabinet
of curiosities, isn't simply a matter of choosing
a form; it also comes down to recalling that
understanding the world occurs in the inventory of
the materials of the perceptible through the three
kingdoms, animal, vegetable and mineral.
The Garden of Forking Paths takes its name from a
Borges short story of stringent brevity. The show
and the short story are based on a temporal maze.
In Borges's fictional tale, a secondary story is
grafted onto the main one. This secondary story
deals with an ancestor of the protagonist who is
the creator of a book and a maze.
I was invited to put together a show in Istanbul
and my discovery of that city made it possible to
carry on with my exploration of notions that lie at
the core of my interests and projects: the maze,
where everything seems to repeat, corridors, crossroads
and rooms; the enigma of the work of art,
which cannot be reduced to a single meaning; the
layers of memory; the sedimentation of ideas; revelation
through analysis; entropy, the science that
measures disorder, which is synonymous with transformation
and degradation; origins, whether buried,
forgotten, revealed, fantasized, virtual or invented,
the starting point and conclusion of the human
adventure. I chose that title for the final episode
of the trilogy because the word “garden” also evokes
for me the spatial and temporal territory of an
exhibition in which each visitor can follow the path
they choose, to understand the world but also to
lose themselves there.
These three shows betray a form of anxiety before
the fragility of the world while bringing to light
in the work of contemporary artists a resurgence of
timeless, universal subjects embodied in archetypal
forms.
Like an ultracontemporary symptom of protection and
resistance.
Claire Le Restif
