Incomparables

A review of

Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel

(New Impressions of Raymond Roussel)

Place: Palais de Tokyo

13, avenue du Président Wilson, 75 116 Paris

Level 1 - Galerie Seine

Dates: 27/02/2013 - 20/05/2013

« My soul is a strange factory » -Raymond Roussel

New Impressions of Raymond Roussel points us towards an intellectual history that maps

out art’s role in creating a social allegory for the poetic psychoanalysis1 of mechanized

pleasure - in circular struggle with the mechanized mass killings of World War I and II,

the holocaust, and Hiroshima. And the rewards of such exhausting circularity are

considerable, given both the historical significance of Raymond Roussel’s influence and

its unapologetic relevance to today’s cyber culture - with its intransigent obliqueness and

mechanical dizziness.

But if I were going to generate an art exhibition as homage to a particularly flamboyant

artist,2 even if un peu obscur, I would think that it would be advantageous to try to match

the aesthetic qualities of that person (absurdly intricate mechanical interlacings) with the

show’s general aesthetic. Unfortunately, that was not the least bit achieved with the

homage to the wildly creative dandy writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933)3 that is at the

Palais de Tokyo centre d'art contemporain in Paris.

1 At age 17, Roussel wrote Mon Âme, a long poem published three years later in Le Gaulois. By 1896, he hadcommenced editing his long poem La Doublure when he suffered a mental crisis. After the poem was published onJune 10, 1897 and was completely unsuccessful, Roussel began to see the psychiatrist Pierre Janet.2 Poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast3 Raymond Roussel was born in Paris in 1877. His writings, including the novels Impressions of Africa and Locus Solusand volumes of poetry and drama, were largely ignored in his lifetime, but have since been championed by the likes ofMichel Leiris (whose father was Roussel’s accountant), Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet (his first novel, LeVoyeur, was originally titled La Vue in homage to Roussel’s long 1904 poem of the same name), Georges Perec, HarryMathews, John Ashbery and Michel Foucault (Foucault wrote a critical study, Death and the Labyrinth, after thechance discovery of one of Roussel’s volumes in an antiquarian shop across from the Luxembourg Gardens). Rousseldied under mysterious circumstances (apparently by suicide) in 1933 in Palermo in Siscily after he went broke chasingliterary fame before his death - decades before his work began receiving the acceptance he craved. He is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

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While access to much of the remarkable work here (including five of Roussel’s

otherworldy hand written manuscript pages for his last book Comment j'ai écrit certains

de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of my Books) and a wonderful cookie-encasing

sculpture memento called Etoile cosmique (Cosmic Star) - a glass and silver case that

Roussel had made for a star-shaped biscuit he brought back from lunch in Juvisy-sur-

Orge with the astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) on July 29, 1923) is to be

appreciated and relished, the cavernous half-finished Level 1 Galerie Seine devoured and

neutralized any stylistic moods of gamesmanship that are associated with Roussel: such

as the famously extravagant, yet intricately hermetic, elaborate mechanamorphic

constructions that verged on the exuberantly preposterousness of a machine running

infinitely wild. Perhaps if I had seen the other two manifestations of this show -

Impressions of Raymond Roussel held at the Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid) in 2011 and the

Museu Serralves (Porto) in 2012 - I may not have felt so disappointed in the general lack

of neurotic deliriousness experienced in this one.

Granted that Raymond Roussel’s disregard for financial restraint4 cannot be matched by

the Palais de Tokyo, but still the gutted construction materials hanging overhead in this

ugly cavernous space takes the eye and mind out of the magnificently intricate

labyrinthine quality typical of his extravagant writings: as established in the prose work

Impressions d’Afrique (1910) (a work that features a painting machine that duplicates the

color spectrum of the sky at dawn),5 Locus Solus (1914) (like Impressions d’Afrique,

written according to formal constraints based on homonymic puns) and the obsessive but

convulsingly poetic Nouvelle Impressions d’Afrique (1932).6 Thus the larger the art (even

as it was needed to fill this mammoth half-raw space) the worse it connected to Roussel’s

sense of virtual impenetrability through mechanical precision.

4 In 1894, at age 16, he inherited a substantial fortune from his deceased father and began to write poetry to accompanyhis musical compositions. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms.5 The story told in Impressions of Africa is a nominally bare-bones fantasy. The shipwrecked inhabitants of the Lyseus,en route from Marseille to Argentina, are captured by an African potentate, Talou, who holds them hostage whileawaiting their ransom. The ship’s manifest includes actors, singers, musicians, fearless naturalists, a slew of carpenters,and, fortuitously, a trove of instruments, lumber, scientific equipment, and trained animals. Partly to keep themselvesbusy, the motley Europeans, dubbing themselves the Incomparables, decide to stage a set of performances. Convergingwith their gala is Talou’s military triumph over a rival clan (and the execution of a handful of unloyal subjects). This isthe back-story of Impressions of Africa, literally.6 New Impressions of Africa is a 1,274-line poem, consisting of four long cantos in rhymed alexandrines, each a singlesentence with parenthetical asides that run up to five levels deep. From time to time, a footnote refers to a further poemcontaining its own depths of brackets. Roussel worked and reworked the 1,274 lines of New Impressions of Africa overa seventeen-year period, rewriting each one as many as twenty times to accomplish a mordant succinctness.

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Mike Kelly’s lumbering black cave Kandors 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude) (2011)

and Rodney Graham’s Camera Obscura Mobile (1995-1996) installation were

particularly unmatched to Roussel’s obsessive minute attention; a concentration that is

capable of whirling together copious narratives from a veiled network of murky puns and

obscured double entendres in a way that anticipates Oulipian. Mark Manders’s steamy

black connectivist sculpture Mind Study (2011), Giuseppe Gabellone’s beautiful silver

sculpture L’Assetalo (Thirsty Man) (2008) and Jacques Carelman’s droll motion

sculpture Le Diamont (The Dimond) (1975) worked only a bit better in reinforcing a

spirit of intricate mechanicalness as they each ate up almost an entire room. A relatively

fascinating installation by André Maranha, Pedro Morais, Jorge Queiroz and Francisco

Tropa called Tres Moscas (Three Flies) (2012) did eat an entire room and only delivered

limited thematic power in terms of absurd interlacing.

Much more capable of such finicky and arcane mesmerizing rhythms were the more

intimate yet preposterous works of Thomas Bayrle (his deadpan pulsating romantic

machine Spatz von Paris (2011) is one of the highlights of the show). Rodney Graham’s

series of books called The System worked well in the context and it was captivating to see

displays of the literary journal Revue Locus Solus, established by American writers John

Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Kenneth Koch and James Shuyler. Published in Paris between

1961 and 1962, the journal formed a bridge between French authors, both historical and

contemporary, and writers from the New York School and the Beat Generation. The

Collège de Pataphysique was represented by the writer Jean Ferry who published several

studies devoted to Roussel, including L’Afrique des Impressions, a detailed analysis

which consists of considering the text as instructions for users and reconstructing, in the

form of maps, diagrams and schedules, the journeys and events that took place at

Ponukélé, an imaginary place in Roussel’s Africa. Two comical cosmic Joseph Cornell

boxes, Blue Sand Box and Sand Fountain from the early 1950s pleased me, as they

bracketed a stream of photographed drawings of fantastic imaginary architecture from

1857 by Victorien Sardou - as did an early Pataphysical video by Jean-Christophe

Averty. The irascible Salvador Dalí is represented with his short motion picture

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (1975), made with the filmmaker José Montes-

Baquer. Dalí read Roussel’s books as early as the 1920s and Roussel had a great

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influence on Dalí’s “critical paranoia” method. Dalí, who died with a copy of

Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest

writers ever. Jean Tinguely is inserted, rightly, into this mix with a brain-teasing manic

lithograph from 1966-67 called Requiem pour une feuille morte (Requiem for a Dead

Leaf), rather than an expected endless drawing machine contraption, that would have

more directly interlocked with Roussel’s imagined painting machine.

And Roussel’s major inspiration (along with novelist and naval officer Pierre Loti), the

author Jules Verne, has a wacky lithograph of a flat globe studded with images entitled

Around the World in Eighty Days from 1880. Roussel greatly admired the works of

Verne - which he read over and over again, fascinated with their extraodinary voyages

and machines, full of bachelor scientists completely absorbed in positivist exploratory

dreams taken to delirious extremes. At that scale of interlacing, some of the hypnotic

effect of Roussel’s capacious playful circularity is possible to feel.

However, Gabriele Di Matteo’s contribution to the show’s circularity is essential. His

hand-painted over digital-painting Marcel Duchamp, a life in pictures by André Raffray

illustrates the time when Duchamp attended a showing of Impressions d’Afrique in 1912,

an experience Duchamp would describe as revelatory. As Gabriele Di Matteo depicts,

Duchamp, along with Guillaume Appollinaire, Picabia and Picabia’s wife Gabrielle

Buffet, attended a performance of Impressions of Africa: the play by Roussel based on his

book. Duchamp later credited Roussel with the inspiration for his The Bride Stripped

Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). There are several original notes by

Duchamp and a drawing that he made for The Large Glass in 1912-1915 in the show, as

well as quite a few photos of Duchamp with The Large Glass. Among them is the

striking photo of Duchamp that was taken by Man Ray in 1920 that shows a star carved

out in Duchamp’s hair. This work connects ludicrously well with Roussel’s star shaped

cookie piece, Etoile cosmique, from just three years later.

Historically, the mechanamorphic impulse behind Marcel Duchamp's works from 1912

(that derived a good deal from Roussel) is of great significance. That is when Duchamp

started producing paintings and drawings depicting mechanized sex acts such as

Mechanics of Modesty and The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride - and the fantastic

machine-body work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even that follow his

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exposure to the play Impressions d’Afrique - is an inescapable point of reference for the

avant-garde of the 20th century. The same may be said for Francis Picabia (who has a

room of paintings all to himself at the show La Collection Michael Werner just a stone

throw away at the Musée d'Art Moderne Ville de Paris).

The elaborateness of the machine, for Duchamp and Picabia, became the symbol of

sexual bliss7 attainable through concept connected to auto-sexual autonomy in

contradiction to the horror that mechanized war had brought. By hypnotizing attention,

the machine freed them from troubling obsessions and personal hang-ups through the

alternative model of android life; intimating both our rush of desperation and our ecstatic

release, refracted through a web of glazed impersonality. If the machine, as a

representative of order, was a fascination Duchamp and Picabia used to balance out the

age’s clumsiness, whether of the mind or flesh, Roussel’s mechanamorphic production

and machine forms refigured the human body into an almost mechanized substance.

In The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even, which positions a central bride

machine over a bachelor apparatus, Duchamp, with the strictness of machinery, applies

fantasy to seduction and masturbation. In a way, Duchamp suggests that we (as viewers)

can use his art as a vehicle for self-transcendence into a kind of dream world of nonsense

sex. This rabbit-hole logic he took from Roussel.

So New Impressions of Raymond Roussel succeeds when it outlines an eccentric

expanding circular history of 20th-century art, linking the points between artists and

writers who have talked of the influence of this author and his writings on their work:

starting with Dada (Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia), then André Breton and the Surrealists

(like Michel Leiris, Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau) to Neo-Dada Nouveau réalisme (Jean

Tinguely) through Oulipo (Georges Perec) Pataphysicians (Jean Ferry, Jean-Christophe

Averty and the Collège de Pataphysique) and the authors of the nouveau roman (like

Alain Robbe-Grillet). As noted above, his most direct influence in the English-speaking

world was on the New York School of poets John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, James

Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.

7 Around the same point in time, Dr. Freud was explaining in his lectures that complex machines that repeat in dreamssignified the genital organs. Roussel's descriptions of eggs on plates and the multiple allusions to the odor of urine afterthe eating of asparagus are typical of a poetic-mechanical apparatus helping to take us further into the area of theunconscious and the sexual.

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Writing as art – or - art as writing: this is the theoretical ripe fruit plucked from Nouvelles

impressions de Raymond Roussel - art theory as art - made conceivable by Roussel’s

inventions of language machines that produced texts through the use of repetitions and

combination/permutations. This machine-like logic provides art with a seemingly pure

spectacle of endless variety of textual games and combinations flowing in circular form.

(We see and feel this most fully, however, in the sprawling and dazzling Julio Le Parc

kinetic op art retrospective on the first floor of the Palais de Tokyo, rather than in this

show.)

And there are lessons here for painting, also. Within this writing process Roussel

described a number of fantastic machines, including a painting machine in his novel

Impressions of Africa. This painting machine wonderfully describes and foresees the

arrival of computer-robotic technology and it's application to visual art which we have

available to us today, a century after he envisioned it.

The web also regenerates deep connections to the past; so cyberspace, this territory which

stretches out from hypertext to the world-wide computer network, from virtual reality to

video games, might also be theorized as the domain of Roussel’s idea of reduplicating

without duplication, reiterating without repeating: his game-of-mirrors cosmos. His is a

strident activity lost in an infinite navigation from one sort of encounter to another in

which the affirmation of the other keeps appearing and disappearing in the play of

mechanical maneuvers (or mechanisms) destined to avert gratification. This is where the

bachelor apparatus of Duchamp repeats itself ad infinitum by transmitting the machine

via an alter-ego.

But too, New Impressions of Raymond Roussel reminds us that Raymond Roussel's

themes and procedures also involved imprisonment and liberation, exoticism,

cryptograms and torture by language - all formally reflected in his working technique

with its inextricable play of double images, repetitions, and impediments, all giving the

impression of the pen running on by itself through the dreamy usage and baroque play of

mirrored form.

Roussel's running on repetition technique, as used in the Thomas Bayrle sculpture, for

example, lends itself well to the creation of unforeseen, automatic and spontaneously art

which gives me the feeling of prolonging action into eternity through the ceaseless,

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fantastic constructions of the work itself, transmitting an altered, exalted and orgasmic

state of mind which after the initial dazzling creates one predominant overall effect: that

of creating doubt through mechanical discourse.

The image of enclosure is common with Roussel where a secret to a secret is held back,

systematically imposing a formless anxiety in the reader through the labyrinthine

extensions and doublings, disguises and duplications of his texts, which make all speech

and vision undergo a moment of annihilation.

New Impressions of Raymond Roussel succeeds when it presents to us through intimacy

the model of quiet perfection of the eternally repetitive mechanical machine which

functions independently of time and space, pulling us into a logic of the infinite. We can

learn this from Roussel's final rebus-like book, Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres

(How I Wrote Certain of my Books); the last of his conceptual machines, the machine

which contains and repeats within its mechanism all those mental machines he had

formerly described and put into motion, making evident the machine which produced all

of his machines - the master machine.8 All of these machines map out an eccentric spiral

space that is circular in nature and thus an abstract attempt at eliminating time. They

reproduce the old myths of departure, of loss and of return. They construct a crisscrossed

mechanical map of the two great mythic spaces so often explored by western

imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden, containing the quest, the return and the

treasure (for example the geography of the Argonauts and the labyrinth) - and the other

space of polymorphosis noise: the visible transformation of instantly crossed frontiers

and borders, of strange affiliations, of spells, and of symbolic replacements (the space of

the Minotaur).

Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel potentially removes us out of our quiet and

glib indolence and points us in the potent direction of expanding intensity. I believe that

shows like Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel are critical to us now because the

8 Roussel had kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text, How I WroteCertain of My Books, where he describes it as follows: "I chose two similar words. For example, billard (billiard) andpillard (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almostidentical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first andfinish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always totake them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creationmoreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the imagesby dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus."

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counter-mannerist excess found there can problematize the popular simulacra that art has

become - and make livelier the underground intricately strange privateness of the human

animal.

Joseph Nechvatal

joseph@nechvatal.net

Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel (New Impressions of Raymond Roussel) has work in it by:

Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Jean-Michel Alberola, Jean-Christophe Averty, Zbynek Baladrán, Thomas

Bayrle, Jacques Carelman, Guy de Cointet, Collège de Pataphysique, Joseph Cornell, Salvador

Dalí, Gabriele Di Matteo, Thea Djordjadze, Marcel Duchamp, Giuseppe Gabellone, Rodney Graham, João

Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Mike Kelley, Revue Locus Solus, Pierre Loti, Sabine Macher, Man

Ray, Mark Manders, André Maranha, Pedro Morais, Jorge Queiroz et Francisco Tropa, Jean-Michel

Othoniel, Victorien Sardou, Joe Scanlan, Jean Tinguely, Jules Verne.

See: http://palaisdetokyo.com/fr/exposition/nouvelles-impressions-de-raymond-roussel