• 1 Original title: Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.
• 2 Original title: À la recherche du temps perdu.

2 Talks by Michel Delville and Livio Belloï, “US art between erasing and dematerializing”, deals with the work that emphasizes aporia, in literature, art, and film. Introducing Jen Bervin’s poems from her book Nets, created by erasing words from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Michel Deville mentions past modern works created by erasure: Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased De Kooning”, Ray Johnson’s Radi-os (an erasure book from John Milton’s Paradise Lost), and Marcel Broodthaers work on Mallarmé’s A Throw of the dice will never abolish chance1, itself dealing with typographical play and empty spaces. Unlike Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes die-cut book-sculpture, Bervin shows us the original words from Shakespeare like a palimpsest underneath. Bervin’s “net” from Sonnet #135 is typical of her meta-textual preoccupation: she shows only the word “Will”, selecting it thirteen times; “Will” is of course the Bard, desire and legacy, and an auxiliary verb. There is irony in such physical treatment of words, and other examples came up: Robert Smithson’s A Heap of Language, both as artwork (piled words forming a kind of pyramid) and manifesto. Most brilliantly, Jérémie Bennequin, displays the eraser bits, the detritus, that results from his erasure of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time2 (building a time pyramid).

• 3 For more on Morrison cf. David Lipson, “An Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Bill Morrison”, InM (...)

3Livio Belloï introduced American, avant-garde filmmakers, Paul Sharits and Bill Morrison. Both deconstruct old films and film physical experiments with the state of the celluloid material support. Sharit’s Bad Burns (1982) shows the effects of a piece of film burning using a “prepared projector” like John Cage’s quirky “prepared piano”, objects stuck in the chords. An expert in selectivity, Bill Morrison, particularly in Decasia (2002), works with the found archival footage in various stages of degradation, projecting the “diseased” film to contemporary music.3 For example we see two figures from a forgotten film dancing, while the pock marks of the support seem to execute their own, melancholy dance macabre. Another filmmaker, the Mexican Naomi Uman, in Removed (1999.) whites the female figures out of a porn flick.

• 4 Josef Beuys famous statement (“Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler”) appears on the Tate Modern website, (...)

4 To delete is to create; to copy can be too, as Eliane Elmaleh (Université du Mans) underlines in “Appropriation/dematerialization in the American Postmodern Art of the 1980s”, detailing a series of post-modern strategies influenced by Surrealists and Duchampians. The ghostly nature of life under proliferating media images means nothing can be experienced directly, the subject of much Pop art. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard theorized it in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976). Among artists Douglas Crimp called the “pictures generation” appropriation techniques fluster expectations about originality, and interrogate our epistemology. Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, the purest examples, wielding a light touch technically, swinging a sledgehammer socio-critically. Levine presents well-photographed versions of masterpieces creating a cannon: arguably, in After Van Gogh, After Degas, and After Mondrian, the only change from the original is the ghostly word “after”. She is fancier conceptually in her Fountain, a copy of Duchamp’s originally unoriginal urinal, but polished-bronze like a Brancusi. Prince realized how much talent was in the advertising art behind the copy-writing. Removing brand and message from the Marlboro cowboy, he reveals multiple manipulation levels, and presents stunning, inspiring photography. A provocative phrase by Joseph Beuys haunts the movement’s ironical practices: “Every man is an artist”.4

• 5 David Antin, Definitions, Caterpillar Press, New York, 1967.
• 6 Antin sometimes writes the first person subject pronoun with a lowercase i.
• 7 cf. David Antin. What it means to be avant-garde. New York: New Directions Books, 1993.
• 8 Eleanor Antin, “Notes on Transformation,” Flash Art 44/45 (April 1974): 69.

5Each reader makes the text for David Antin. While the appropriationists do away with originality (but not esthetics), he sidelines poetic form as Hélène Aji (Paris-Nanterre) indicates in “About David Antin’s definitions (1967) as Improbable Imprints”. Known for his improvised talk pieces, the artistic unity for Antin is coherency of discourse, beautiful lucidity, and humor. Focusing on Definitions, an as-yet uncollected work (a rare edition, the 1967 Caterpillar Press version, shows how each copy could be addressed to a specific reader).5 Performance artist, Eleanor Antin, (David’s wife) created the book, in spiral-notebook form. All sorts of ephemera are inside: drawings, insurance contracts, and other stuff of the moment. Indeed, Antin has said, ”i’m6 such a poor avant-gardist/because i’m mainly concerned with the present”.7 Eleanor Antin was on a similar wavelength to her husband when she states: “[…] I am a post-conceptual artist concerned with the nature of human reality, specifically with the transformational nature of the self”8 Ludwig Wittgenstein on language, and his lecturing mode also influence Antin who engages with the limits imposed by language - negative capacity, and provisionality are keys for him.