Ultralab

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in the Artworld

It was back before 2001 - that year when the world shifted dramatically if not into a new millennium then at least into realities that no millenarian anxieties had foreseen, in all their nightmare scenarios of apocalyptic warfare and delirious religious zealotry, of globalisation, tsunamis, seismic quakes and hurricanes, of earth-shattering natural and cultural disasters, if such a distinction still made any sense.

The Twin Towers were still standing as the beacons of Lower Manhattan, the axes of Good and Evil did not exist, Mollah Omar and Oussama bin Laden were not household words and no one gave a second thought to Iraq. Despite Michel Houellebecq's novel, Thailand remained a hotspot for sexual tourism.

The mere iteration of the word "terrorism" terrorised no one.

The 2002 French presidential election hadn't happened. Chirac hadn't been elected with 82% of the votes. Sarkozy hadn't said "scum" nor talked of cleansing the suburbs with a pressure washer.

The euro was not yet in circulation.

The European constitution, which had not yet been written, had not been put to a referendum.

The world of culture was still arguing about cultural industries. The protocol for unemployment benefits in France's cultural sector had not yet been thrown into question and the contract workers in the entertainment industry hadn't yet gone on strike during the Avignon Theatre Festival.

Aids was devastating Africa, particularly Southern Africa. The affluent countries engaged in polemics about barebacking, relapsing, backrooms. Special K was the fashionable drug at parties and the "French Touch", on the electronic music scene, was losing its edge. At the Cannes Film Festival, Patrice Leconte had a fit about film critics, whom he found all too critical.

Reality TV, which had begun with the first Gulf War, hadn't yet invaded every last channel on television. These televised forms, drawing upon a "viewer to viewer" experience, hadn't yet got to the point of "massifying individualistic behaviour", as has become the rule in businesses, placing the individual and his or her efforts at "self-actualisation" - to become "a somebody" - at the very heart of their system. Berlusconi wasn't yet in power, attracting voters by pulling the most vulgar heartstrings of propaganda and engaging in the most crass displays of money.

The Internet bubble, the dot-coms and the new stock-market boom hadn't yet collapsed only to spring back again.

Free software - "free as in free speech, not as in free beer" - set the conditions of possibility for net culture, with the idea "that the source code, that is, the text, may not only be freely copied but actually modified, voluntarily recycled and commercially redistributed by anyone and without the author's consent." As such, it promised a full-fledged rethinking of notions of quotation, plagiarism and authorship. The blogosphere had yet to begin its incommensurable growth spurt and the countless forms of communication on Internet had not yet broadcast its deluge of unverifiable information.

Google wasn't yet the world's biggest search engine, with an image bank of a billion pictures, calling up hundreds of pages in 35 languages in a split second. No one had been known to "Google" anything.

Downloading music and film with P2P (peer-to-peer) didn't represent 60% of broadband traffic (80% at night).

This cursory and partial recollection of the Old World from before 2001 makes it possible, if only imperfectly, to resituate the contemporary context of the fake invitation card affair.

Between 1998 and 1999, in effect, within the small circles of the French artworld, a number of real invitation cards to fake exhibitions - though attributed to real artists in prestigious galleries and institutions (real cards, fake information, actual names… are you following me?) - led to the article as well as the interview that I published in Libération. All of which are reproduced below.

What is an invitation card in the artworld? A sort of derivation on the announcement or calling-card theme, adapted to fit the events that punctuate artistic life, that is, by and large, the exhibitions as well as the programmes, screenings, performances, readings, debates and inaugurations, which are the pulse of a supposedly hectic schedule. It is the major vector of communication. Generally speaking, it articulates, on both sides, an image and a text, including at the minimum the artists' names, those of the organisers, the places and times of the exhibition, the date of the opening, featuring the logos of the sponsors, extending sometimes to the caption and photographic credit, and in any case, the printer's trademark. Sometimes, too, some portion of the card is reserved for the addressee's name and address as well as for the stamp or postmark. And that's about it. The layout is variable and may follow the graphic design of the institution producing the show or, conversely, develop its own particular style. Today, they are easily sent out over the Internet. But it also remains one of the only printed artefacts in circulation and the need for it has apparently never been so great, despite email, since its budget has been scarcely scaled back at all: mailing out "invitation cards" is thus part and parcel of an exhibition budget and, more broadly, of visual culture. Invitation cards are sent out and received, composed and read, thrown away or filed for safe keeping - they are even collected. A card is an announcement. It is also a document, disclosing the identities around which revolves planet art.

No description will be given here of these cards in particular, which are also published in the pages of this book. It is moreover sketched out in the article in question, along with the effects brought about or at least expected by producing them: a critical force, to begin with. Scrambling the cards or mixing up the pieces through their erratic announcements, these invitation cards revealed an art game whose rules and operations were much more rigid than commonly acknowledged. The discrepancies they formulated by associating such and such artist, gallery or institution in fact shed light on the insider-trading and the who-knows-whom so widely practised in the "milieu". It is a sort of "psychopathology of French artistic life" that is introduced by the dozen invitation cards printed between 1998 and 1999. No more than any other incidents in everyday life, these invitation cards, at once comical and vicious, didn't kill anyone. Indeed the people (Vincent Corpet, Orlan, Emmanuel Perrotin, Hans Haacke, Laurent Garnier…) and the institutions (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Chantal Crousel Gallery, Artpress, Daniel Templon Gallery…) that were mentioned are still alive, present and in some cases flourishing: they have all probably changed less than the world at large since 2001, which reveals a certain permanence within the art milieu, in spite of its out-of-sight out-of-mind reputation.

The article in Libération was not the first. Nor was it to be the last. However, in terms of space, it was one of the most visible. Above all, the accompanying interview conferred both legitimacy on this visibility and authority on the publication as such by opening up a space of intrigue, of a story. With its title, "the booby-trapped invitation card affair" was made public and took on still more reality. Not only did the newspaper article bear witness to the existence of the fake invitation cards that were circulating in the art milieu, but the interview with their alleged authors gave the whole mystery a certain solidity. The information unveiled the machination but not the enigma surrounding its production. It ensures merely the showing alone - that is, in other words, the exhibition. A term that is itself by no means innocent: an exhibition, at the end of the twentieth century, is as much about communication as it is about presentation, in a world entirely subjected to post-industrial symbolics - haven't we seen entire biennials without artworks, made up of lists of virtual artists compiled in the specialised media, recorded, by way of archives, in art history?

For the invitation cards to have been the object of a news report, they had to make their presence felt in the mainstream of the French artworld. At what point were they first noticed? Was the first mail-out on target? Did the second, coming hot on the heels of the first, amplify its effect? Did the third awaken interest in the preceding ones? In the mass of information anyone even mildly interested in contemporary art receives on a daily basis, how is one to distinguish invitation cards whose very condition consists of blending into the mass, and whose specificity is to pass itself off as one of those that institutions (galleries, museums, and so on) send out for communications purposes? For the "booby-trapped invitations cards affair" to function, their succession had to be perceptible, their sequence had to make it understandable that they were by no means the fruit of ill luck in printing erroneous cards; in short, a fiction was born in order that it be narrated.

The fictional machinery also has to operate with neither visible nor verifiable authorship. To remain plausible, obviously no one could claim responsibility for the cards. Furthermore, the bulk mailings, sent out to a "file" of people gravitating within the artworld, were posted anonymously. It seems that certain institutions or people, either somewhat more curious or more annoyed than others, sought to bribe those printers known within the milieu into disclosing the emissaries' identities - in vain.

Constructing a fictional narrative through the use of mail-outs through the postal system was an idea that had already been exploited by conceptual artists like On Kawara, for instance. He engaged in a one-way correspondence with artworld personalities. Beginning in 1970, On Kawara started sending out telegrams (which, at the time, was the medium of urgent communication) to his friends, colleagues and professionals, all systematically dated and bearing the same message: "I am still alive" - the basic fundamental message of what is sent through the mail, though generally more prolix, when their writers are working to rule. On Kawara's telegrams allowed for several variations as to their support (which was sometimes also a postcard) or text. Thus in the exhibition 18 Paris IV 1970, there was this succession of three telegrams: "I am not going to commit suicide-don't worry" (5 December 1969); "I am going to commit suicide-worry" (8 December 1969); and "I am going to sleep-forget it" (11 December 1969). The fiction was thus built around an affair of life and death.

Though the formula "I am alive" supposed that its author was alive at the moment when he asserted himself as sender with respect to his addressees, it did not validate the fact that he remained so at the moment when his recipients actually read the message he had sent: On Kawara's formulation "I am still alive" thus underscores the ambiguity, even as it raises the veil of fiction. As art historian Louis Marin pointed out in a different era, it is not possible to say in the first person singular, sentences such as "I am dead" or "I am sleeping". Consciousness is the necessary condition of locution. Unless, of course, it is a character who is speaking of another reality - that of the text or of art. In On Kawara's case, though the telegrams were in each instance addressed to one living person in particular, they inserted themselves, one after the other, into a full set of messages from the past or yet to come - that is, into a broader body of work.

With the "invitation cards affair", a fiction was also constructed through mail-outs (authenticated by the postmark). Not with letters of telegrams; rather, in this case, the narrative was fuelled by a procedure of traffic, in both senses of the term: as circulation and as peddling something somewhat shady. The booby-trap, if it existed, contained in the invitation cards, consisted of producing, piece by piece, a parallel history, like a history of art, outfitted with a slightly altered program, rather like in the stories of Philip K. Dick. Everything is normal and nothing is. Which is only normal since the fiction is the starting point for really inscribing oneself in reality.

Until today, no one has been identified as the author of this fiction, just like Ulysses, when, in Homer's Odyssey, he introduces himself under the name of "outis" ("no one") to the Cyclopes Polyphemus, before attacking him. All that was known, quite simply, was that it was the fruit of collective authorship. Indeed, following a campaign comprising ten mail-outs, and the publication of a poster recapitulating the operation, the paper published an interview in which a certain claim to its paternity was made. Announcing a fairly vague collective, a structure made up of people "belonging to the artworld, and others belonging to the world of publishing or advertising", it nevertheless continued to conceal the authors' identities. At the time, for a journalist like myself, this admittedly raised a certain number of difficulties. Communication with the operators, who insisted absolutely on remaining faceless, took place thanks to a journalist under my editorship, by means of a conference call. Making it impossible for me to cross-check my sources, the secret surrounding the identities gave the affair a detective novel-like twist.

The anonymity did not raise problems for journalists alone. Of course, all the recipients must have been going nuts. In particular, the people and organisations who had been included in the fiction itself: the artists, galleries and institutions which had been literally exhibited, dragged into a story that was not their own. They had been forced to resort to publishing a disclaimer, a denial proclaiming "I am not the author of this invitation card", or "we are not the authors of this press release", or yet again "I do not exhibit in such institutions". These acts disappropriated those who signed them, for in an act of supreme irony, they were laying claim to not being authors. That was where the booby-trap was at work.

Only several, at the time, could bring themselves to laugh about it, and those were of course the instigators, the authors of the fiction, who carried the experiment right through to the end, without telling anyone. Even when the names of such and such an artist or critic were mentioned in their presence. Even when such and such a curator boasted to "knowing the author of the real fake invitation cards very well" right in the unperturbed faces of those in the know. It was in all this false information that the full scope of what the "affair's" instigators had wanted to demonstrate - that is, the rigidity of a milieu that in reality is highly hierarchical. For of course the authors had to be legitimate in the eyes of an artworld persuaded that only one of "their own" could possibly be adequately informed so that the invitation cards appear believable. The fictionalisation had to function like a "party game", where the guilty is always amongst us, and never a stranger. But in this particular endogamic conspiracy theory, certain actors were missing from the credits.

This vision of a "subject supposed to know" in the artworld adopted a disquieting side through its absence of openness. It would have sufficed to shift the cursor ever so slightly, in the direction of music for instance, in order to understand the function of anonymity - one avatar of the "death of the author" - at work in the famous blank records of the 1990s, for instance, electronic phantoms recorded without names, without any preliminary information, without any images. But to have done so would have entailed that this particular artworld, organised "à la Française" accomplish another twist, which would have consisted in seeking out art amongst non-artists or at least amongst those, who, in the art production chain, were not identified as such. It would have required, perhaps, going back - as do both Jean Clair and Thierry de Duve (both specialists on the work of Marcel Duchamp, though from opposing perspectives) - to the highly French separation between the "fine arts" on the one hand and the applied arts on the other, a split going back to the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, with the creation of the Louvre Museum on the one hand and the Arts and Crafts Conservatory on the other. A story of framing…

Throughout the twentieth century, however, the issue regarding statements in art grew singularly complicated, thanks to arrangements proposing a fiction breaking out of the frame. The authors, be they singular or plural, of the invitation cards were also inscribing themselves - in a far more self-conscious way than could have been imagined at the time - in the very core of artistic practices placing at the centre of their concerns the question of authorship, objecthood, the institution and spectatorship, Marcel Duchamp, Manzoni or Marcel Broodthaers to IFP, Matt Mullican and Philippe Thomas, who, with his agency readymades belong to everyone® had proposed to introduce "a misprint into the text of art history".

That misprint, in Philippe Thomas's work, from 1981 up until his death in 1995, was nothing short of the organising of a vast theatre in view of a future fiction, still to be written; a theatre where all the levels, artists, critics, journalists, collectors, curators all speak through a voice which is not their own, their signature enabling them to become one of the narrators of a work to which they attribute their names. But everything is written before their performance and the "presentation", at work in each exhibition, is but a reiteration, a "reversal of the temporality of the artwork, a 'everything begins with reproduction', which plays itself out and constitutes the most severe assault on the essentialist prejudice of the modern movement."

The fiction of the invitation cards, in turn, shed light on the workings of a general aesthetics of the archive: as pointed out, the invitation card, as a vector of information, a communications tool, an advertising instrument, is inscribed as a document in the service of art history. It is one of the emblems of the epistemological turn, as represented by the transformation of the visual arts into a series of "events", with the ongoing shift in budgeting priorities from culture toward communication. The invitation card has even managed to leach into the interpretative discourse surrounding art. Thus, in specialised journals, particularly in the English-speaking world, the sheer number of pages of advertising, comprised of endless stacks of images taken from invitation cards, has today far surpassed the number of pages devoted to critical articles. In this liberal logic, the collective behind the "invitation cards affair" had thus anticipated how their mail-outs would be valorised, taking on value as "collectors' items" by producing the recapitulative poster. The eleventh mail-out thus gave the invitation cards the autographic status of an artwork, even while denying it to them through reproduction.

And then September 11, 2001 occurred. The Twin Towers collapsed, the word "terrorism" became the standard epithet for the axis of evil, as opposed to the axis of good, allowing the Nietzschean invocation to regress into a binary world.

"The booby-trapped invitation cards affair", a light-hearted if not indeed comic title, is today tainted by more macabre overtones and it is perhaps for this reason that the instigators, some time later, felt the need to break the well-kept secrecy shrouding their anonymity and to disclose their identity in the pages of this catalogue.

No doubt in order to defuse the booby-trap. But also to reset it, to "remonetise the circulation", as they put it. What would be the point of coming back to this affair if the authors themselves didn't wish to come clean and claim responsibility? On two levels, for the protagonists from Ultralab and Labomatic, respectively an artists' collective and a graphic design group. With regard to the latter, the whole affair bears out their skill (mastery of the tools and rules governing the composition of such documents, underscored by the discretion, or even the invisibility of any stylistic trace which would have given them away). With respect to the artists collective, the affair formulates retrospectively a common project, which has subsequently developed in other media and in other forms. From now on, the "booby-trapped invitation card affair" thus functions like a "visiting card", printed on both sides, one side for graphic design, the other side for art.

But there is also, as the protagonists acknowledge, a moral reason behind breaking with the anonymity that had been so carefully maintained. The collapse of the Twin Towers and its consequences have in effect utterly altered the situation. Anonymity has shifted to the side of power in the post-911 world and the "war on terrorism", where only certain victims get to be named, not others; where only certain lives are worthy of tears; where issues of identity, "chosen not imposed", aim at separating the wheat from the chaff. Speaking in one's own name has once again become political speech.

All the more so in that the name in question remains collective. And a group always leaves scope for the imagination.

"We are all thieves, we are all judges," wrote, in 1973, someone who might answer to the name of Stephan Czerkinsky, in a dialogue with someone who might be called Gilles Deleuze. "The discourse of painting is already in the Penal Code, in the Civil, Customs, Auctioneering and Professional Buyers Code as well as in everyone's body."

Elisabeth Lebovici
Translated from the French by Stephen Wright