Coherence
The order and consistency of thoughts or statements that convey rational agreement. Molecular cohesion draws two of the same kinds of molecules together. Biological cohesion refers to the congenital union of one part with another. Coherent light maintains a fixed, phased relationship of electromagnetic waves, constant over a period of time from various points relating to the direction of propagation. To cohere or to be coherent means to stick together, to have a natural agreement, and to be naturally and logically connected. Coherence doesn't require correctness, only fit.
Orbits
Swiss artist Stéphane Dafflon, born 1972, entered the world at the waning of one revolution – social, sexual, feminist, anti-war, environmental – and the dawning of another in computer science, satellite communication, radical conservatism, and globalization. A year later OPEC increased the price of crude oil, and strife in the Middle East (the Yom Kippur War) sent the world into recession, inflation, and stagflation (stagnation plus inflation). A diminishing of purchasing power began to shuffle working people about like the weather (and continues to).
Stéphane grew up in a country village, Neyruz, Switzerland, population about 750, a place that, at the right distance or seen through a camera might look like a postcard, but from up close, watching his parents work their farm, it might look like a world being passed by.
As a kid he liked to draw and customize. His childhood-friend's father had transformed an old inn into a very big home, with a bar and jukebox and an enormous worktable in the salon, and the barn out back into a studio and a yard full of Machine Age detritus – rusting piles of flat-iron, gears, rods, and connectors, waiting to be transformed from machine-slaves into curious objects of art. Stéphane and his friend used one of those sculptures as a goalpost. In the staircase of his friend's house was an odd, to him, monochrome painting in cobalt blue, framed under glass. “It's a Klein,” his friend said. Stéphane wondered why such a painting was art. But his friend's father, Mr. Tinguely, was an artist of similar strangeness. And during his friendship with the artist's son (continuing today), from age eight to eighteen, Stéphane noticed that Mr. Tinguely didn't repeat the rhythm of the townspeople, but came and went like a satellite of the larger world beyond. His blue Ferrari made him seem like a gangster or a celebrity.
Such lives as Tinguely's (1925-91) are regarded in value judgments measured against vague norms, received information, habits, opinion, and critical distance, which in villages is closer and more personal than in a large city. His fame was urbane, masked in incomprehensible objects, judging by the rusting metal in his backyard. His neighbors might have asked themselves Gauguin>-like questions about where he came from, what he does, where he goes. But they more likely wanted practical answers about how to pay rents and mortgages, set food on the table, and raise children, especially in this complicated modern world. But what did Tinguely know? He drove a princely Ferrari and had so much time for himself.
Stéphane was ten when the word Aids was coined; eleven when the Graphical User Interface, or GUI (GOO-ee in English) was invented – a method for moving, cutting, pasting, and deleting computer-screen “objects,” text or image, electronically. The small foam pads around which the mice skidded and turned would become, years later, the doodle pad for his art. He wouldn't have known that in 1983 or that Aids would ruin free love and pornography would become an electronic tourist industry.
He studied practical things in high school: economics and science. For a year after graduating, while preparing his portfolio to apply to art schools, he thought, if that didn't work out he might study journalism or art history at a university. He was rejected in Geneva, and accepted at École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (Ecal), in 1995. For a short period, catering to practical consideration, he thought he might restore such cars to make a living. By then Tinguely was an “aesthetic echo” (to borrow Duchamp's term) in his personal biography – an interesting reference for a text like this one. And while he and Tinguely tinkered with objects, the only affinity between them was the fickle careers they chose. For art had not only changed in Tinguely's life, it had further changed in Stéphane's.
Energy
Experience is anchored in tradition, received ideas, available technology, communication systems, and means of production and distribution. Traditions aren't inherited; they have to be learned, through repetition, often by force at dinner tables, in classrooms, at home and within institutions. Modern industrialization eroded many timeworn traditions. Some things were slower to change: manners, the hats, suits, starched shirts, and gloves people wore, and a similarity within different classes. But the expectations of daily life and sustenance were for many shattered. Fewer young adults would repeat the lifestyles of their parents. Careers had to be forged from scratch, and were driven by moneymaking and a cult of the personality. Peasants left farms for factories. A growing middle class demanded new products, weekends and holidays. The newly rich encroached on a fading noble class, creating a leisure class. The world seemed to go all topsy-turvy. In 1910, after viewing an exhibition of post-impressionists, which included Cézanne and Picasso, Virginia Woolf declared, “human nature changed.” It wasn't human nature that had changed, but culture and technology.
The artists Woolf commented on had redirected the 19th-century ideas that had parented them – romantic allegory, impressionism's gas-lit moodiness, Symbolism's obscurity and suggestion. These weren't so much decisions as inevitabilities that accorded with modern systems of production and distribution: new methods of analysis, in anthropology, sociology, genetics, psychology, statistics, cinema, and particle physics; newer ways of thinking about human life in a decaying universe in which Nietzsche had declared God dead in 1882, year of Braque's birth – Picasso and Léger were a year old. Such innovations would inhabit modernists like the ghost of change, from Tinguely to Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) to Jack Kerouac (b. 1922) to us.
Partly because of photography – which mechanized the vanishing point, stopped motion, and purported truth – and partly because of the industrial spirit of progress, artistic representation turned from away from the direct observation of nature toward objective matter itself. Avant-garde artists of every stripe aspired to the hardness of machines, the psychology of creative insight, and the defining capacity of a personal style. Art became more abstract. Architects rid buildings of ornamentation and figurines. Poets wrote in rhythms instead of rhymes. Musicians composed atonally, conceptually, and with polyrhythmic structures. Painters and sculptors discussed art's processes the way scientists investigated molecular structures. Form and content were brought to the surface in coloring-book colors and building-block forms – whose stark lines and polished surfaces, like Léger's truncated cones, were their souls. Synthetic styles like cubism, futurism, vorticism, and purism projected a world of objects, speed, and reductionism. Dada and surrealism intertwined urban irony, psychological abstraction, scientific seriousness, and comic absurdity. To be avant-garde meant to be obsessed with specialization, abstraction, and chance.
In the postwar years, modern commerce and technology expanded the modern way of life into domestic products, streamlined transportation, and electronically based information. American abstract expressionism, be-bop jazz, the Beat generation's street literacy, rock and roll, pop art, minimalism, fluxus, happenings, performance, and conceptual art emerged like tentacles from modern European art. They would diffuse back to Europe and, through the new channels of information, would change lives, including in villages like Neyruz, where Stéphane grew up.
The voice of time
The first TV generation, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), benefited from the retooled service economy and its growth industries: building supplies, education, entertainment, sports, advertising, travel, and self-help therapy. “New and improving” products advertised the lifestyle currently being invented. Minds filled up with “Television” and “Talking Heads” (names of two 1980s rock bands). Those voices, transmitted on airwaves, fed people like food-giving house pets who were now spending more time indoors, listening to those soft-selling TV voices. Those voices focused on statistical individuals, turned the folk into the masses, and proffered words like “relationship,” “system,” “popular,” and “environment,” which entered minds thinking about products, progress, and the modern way of life. A burgeoning teen-aged society aped the slouches, sneers, and “cool” street talk of Beat poets, rock musicians, movie stars, and athletes (before steroids).
This was Tinguely's generation, the age of Beat poets (“beat” meaning worn-out, and implying beatitude; a group Plato might have hated and Buddha might have loved), and popular culture. Photographs of Picasso with his shirt off, Dali's mustache, Pollock dripping paint, Brando in biker's cap and jeans, Warhol in sunglasses, and Klein flying into the void made pop art relevant. Gone were stiff traditional formalities of the 19th-century, the suits, hats, and strict moral duties. That civilization had died, although people wouldn't fully realize it until the 1960s.
Yet well into the 1970s art was still based on old-world media: pencils (invented the year Shakespeare was born), sketchpads, paints, and brushes. Meanwhile ballpoint pens, electric typewriters, photocopiers, reel-to-reel film and tape-recorders, Polaroid cameras, and all sorts of electro-mechanical instruments and appliances were antiquating modernism's fountain pens, ring-dialer phones, pneumatic tubes, and mono record players. Electronic tools (extensions of Man's senses as McLuhan called all tools) were faster, but far slower than today's computers, digital electronics, video games, remote control devices, mice, and joysticks (CDs and Sony Walkmans were both marketed in 1983). They were also far easier to understand visually and to repair manually.
Habits inevitably accrued to accommodate new tools. Lives also changed. Boomer artists combined, semiconsciously, the Schools of Paris and New York with rock music, TV, cinema, and their ubiquitous reproductions. When they started showing, in the 1980s, photography would become grander in every way, and terms like “appropriation,” “deconstruction,” “postmodernism,” and “rephotography” were coined to describe the reproduction-based art they made. Some, like Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, and Richard Prince belonged to a “pictures generation,” meaning that film and photography were the source and substance of their art. They worked in studios called lofts, were inspired by French movies, showed in “white cubes” (a term promulgated by Brian O'Doherty in Artforum in 1976), mimicked advertising's scale and presentation, and listened incessantly to music. Modernism was their 19th century. Their habits had been inculcated by complex electronic information technologies, which only a specialist could understand well enough to repair.
Having it
Stéphane owned a computer before attending art school, which he used for games. During his preparatory first year at ECAL (after which teachers influence students to continue in Design or in Art programs) he learned to use the program Illustrator. That bit of computer training connected to his decision to attend art school in the first place, which depended on his portfolio, which had been set in motion in the link-chains of his DNA, half mom, half pop, parents seeding artist to be. Remember, he'd liked to draw and to customize. In art school he was thrust into the psychological demand of self-invention and the visual-tactile requirements of contemporary art – a nameless world without rules, where commerce and art constantly compete.
Art professors rarely tell students that style and a personal aesthetic cannot be taught. The repeated and necessarily repeatable features of a style come into being before they are recognized or named. Students have “it” or they don't. When they do, a relationship to the world is revealed. No style is intrinsically better than another. But differences and aesthetic distinctions are crucial.
Stéphane amalgamated and recombined mental images, cultural data (culture being the transmission of information by nongenetic means), modernism, postmodernism – and perhaps a few superficial echoes from the late Mr. Tinguely, especially his kinetic paintings. Graphic design, minimalism, postmodernism, and art theory were the lingua franca of his art education – and his style. Computers brought him further out of the folk and the modernist environments of his parents and into the image world of contemporary art and life. The click and drop technique he used was not like sketching, but more like erasing, doodling, or rattling a dice shaker. With a mouse and software programs he pieced together schematic paintings, wall paintings, and objects. Multitasking software programs allowed him to manipulate patterns freely and flexibly. He might begin with a rectangle, round its corners, cut it up, and manipulate it again. Add color. Turn it this way and that. Slant it. Rearrange scale and dimension. Shapes could be crossbred like molecules to form complex graphical objects. Stéphane has said the more he used Illustrator the less he needed to use it, having grown and adapted with it, mutatis mutandis. This building-block process is as ancient as constructing teepees or making clothes, but different from drawing through direct observation, because of the tools available.
Manipulating clichés was the basis of the preliterate world's puns, word plays, and patterns. Rejecting clichés and puns was required of writers, who did not have to repeat themselves because books and libraries were the repeating patterns. Writing and accurate representation initiated the first information explosion, beginning in the Late Italian Renaissance. Today's computers have transformed Euclidean geometry's points, lines, and planes into malleable graphic objects, which subsume the history of representation since the dawn of history. Patterns of representation have been simplified in Software programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Word; in search engines (a machine metaphor for a computer) like Google; in digital storage facilities, external hardware, and Internet connections. Computer drawing may even be more like musical improvisation, where harmonic modes can be combined into moods and melodies.
Once a pattern is set into form, related patterns can proliferate like viruses copying themselves. Learning patterns allows us to exploit them and to use them for other purposes. Two parallel lines can evolve into Euclidean geometry and a theory stating that two parallel lines will converge at infinity, proven by an eye gazing down an arrow-straight road. A cross shape used by ancient Romans to crucify criminals could reemerge as the cellular unit for a molecular grid, which eventually became a map with longitude and latitude lines. Patterns of adapted clichés are also essential to software programs and to computers, which are design-making machines, operated with 19th-century keyboards connected by an electronic umbilical cord to an object called a mouse. A computer screen adds a shallow acoustic dimension. Countless iterations of texts and images can be saved and reused. But like all things, it's not what the machine can do, but how the operator uses it.
Stéphane designs paintings, wall paintings, and objects. The paintings are elemental abstractions constructed like visual signs. Where a cross on the road is a sign for a real crossroad, the paintings stand for themselves. They convey a notion of space that inheres to complicated electronic structures, which include movie theaters, headphones, and interactive TVs; i.e., they cohere to representational space today: head space, screen space, cinematic space, and atmospheric space.
