Raymond Hains and La France Déchirée

Of the Public Born: Raymond Hains and La France déchirée* Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

HANNAH FELDMAN

Le peuple constitue ses propres archives. —Michel Foucault, 19741

Art During War

As if to make even more trenchant the period’s own preoccupation with start- ing anew, artistic practices since 1945 have become increasingly welded to the myths of their genesis. From the marvelous to the mundane, origins are traced to, for example, the alleged plane crash in the Crimea that led Joseph Beuys to a career in fat and felt or the daily soup that fed not only Andy Warhol’s body but his imagina- tion as well. For décollage, an art of readymade, torn posters, the story is said to begin one day in December 1949 when Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, two former art students from Brittany, took to the streets of Paris looking for inspiration. Their eureka moment, the story goes, came in front of a palissade, a temporary wooden fence built to contain and conceal one of countless construction sites just a few steps from the ever-exuberant scene at La Coupole. Confronted with layers upon layers of concert announcements that had been posted there, one on top of the other, and subsequently torn through by countless and unknown pedestrians, the young pair was certain that they had found art. No longer content to photograph this large frieze of now useless posters as Hains had been doing for almost a year in the spirit of Brassaï and Wols before him, they tore it down in large chunks, took the fragments home, and adhered them to a canvas.2 Satisﬁed with their work, they signed

* This article is excerpted from my book manuscript, “Public Culture and the Nation: Art and the City in France During Wartime, 1945–Present.” Many thanks to Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jonathan Crary, Rosalyn Deutsche, Rosalind Krauss, Tom McDonough, and especially Jorge Coronado for their insightful comments about the terrain of this project. 1. Michel Foucault, “Anti-Retro,” Cahiers du Cinéma 251–52 (July–August 1974), p. 14. 2. In 1998, Hains adds Daniel Buren’s name to this group of inﬂuences, even though Buren’s project seemed more preoccupied with expanding the context of art’s display so as to bring art into the public sphere than with redeﬁning art for a public purpose. See Raymond Hains and Marc Dachy, Langue de cheval et facteur temps (Reims: Actes Sud, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, 1998), pp. 33, 42. See also Hains’s photographs of décollaged posters in Raymond Hains et la photographie (Paris: Centre National d’Art et Culture Georges Pompidou, 1976).

OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 73–96. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 74 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

Above: Daniel Buren. Rue Jacob, Paris. 1968. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Right: Raymond Hains. L’insoumission. Photograph of the artist in Paris, 1961.

the lower right-hand corner and titled the result Ach alma manetro after three word-fragments still visible in the colorful scrim of garbled typography.3 In these short, mythic moments of “la découverte,” “le choix,” and “le geste appropriatif”—the terms that Hains and Villeglé would employ to distinguish the principal components of their aesthetic activity from the expressive and individu- alized conﬁnes of the École de Paris—décollage was born.4 But, the swagger of origin

3. Villeglé insists that the canvas support was not meant as a reference to the world of painting, as many historians of postwar painting would likely assume. Rather, he claims its pliability and elasticity made it an excellent surface on which to mount the lacerated posters, either in collaged composition or as integral sheaths. He also insists that neither he nor Hains meant their signatures to designate the work as their own creative property. Instead, he maintains that they would have been happy had the “next collector” added his own signature. Whether or not these insistences reflect the truth or are merely refusals to accommodate critical interpretation—for which Villeglé is notorious—remains unclear, although his apparent disregard for, if not naivete about, the financial import of a signature fails to convince. See Dieter Schwarz, “Aperçu historique des affichistes,” in Murmures des rues: François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell (Rennes: Centre Histoire de l’Art Contemporain, 1994), p. 36. 4. As with so many other origin myths, this one too suffers its share of untruths. Ach alma manetro was not, strictly speaking, the first décollage, although it was the first décollage that Hains and Villeglé made in collaboration with each other. Hains had first “discovered” décollage some months earlier when he tore down a poster promoting Gary Davis’s pacifist campaign for World Citizenship. Villeglé maintains that the political implications of La France déchirée “était en gestation dès cet instant.” See Jacques Villeglé, “In illo tempore,” in Urbi & Orbi (Mâcon: Éditions W, 1986), p. 7. While these questions regarding the precise moments of décollage’s invention do not merit much interest unto themselves, I dwell upon them here because they suggest some of what has been excluded by the privileged place that Ach alma manetro has come to assume in the history of postwar French art. The emphasis on Ach alma manetro, a less overtly political décollage and one whose primary critique extends to the postwar Of the Public Born 75

myths aside, décollage’s contribution as an important new art form would take another eight years before realizing itself in the form of its return to the Parisian public as exhibition. Beyond that, it would take an additional four years before Hains would

mount the exhibition, La France déchirée, that would most explicitly actualize the true Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 potential of Ach alma manetro’s “magisterial opening statement” and mobilize the latent potential of décollage as an historically determined critical practice.5 The first of these two exhibitions, Le Loi du 29 juillet 1881, held at Colette Allendy’s gallery in 1957, expanded upon Ach alma manetro’s dialogue with painterly production by associating its aesthetic thrust more specifically with the historical and contemporary possibilities of public, indeed urban, expression. The exhibition’s title, after all, was drawn from the law best known for generating the nearly ubiquitous interdiction “Défense d’afficher, loi de 29 juillet 1881” that is imprinted on all French buildings deemed “public” by virtue of their status as historical monuments or governmental offices, their proximity to intersections of a certain size, and a number of other qualifications far too long to catalog. While this stamp does indeed serve to prohibit public posting on these surfaces, the legislation that generated it back in the Third Republic was not necessarily intended as a restrictive measure.6 Quite the contrary—its original goal had been to target and reverse the many varieties of censorship that had characterized Second

Empire politics, including but by no means limited to those prohibiting public posting. In fact, it was precisely to help guarantee the rights of public expression—including the freedom of the press and, as time would make manifestly apparent, commercial advertising—that the law designated the means by which and the places where street posters could legally and incontestably be posted. The logic went that if governmental and hence, public (in one sense, at least), spaces were kept at a distance from the realm of posting, an unprejudiced arena in which to exercise choice would ﬂourish; no government building would purposefully or

conditions of art-making, not only reveals but has probably also enabled the contemporary disregard for more explicitly political analyses of French postwar art. 5. The phrase comes from Buchloh, who, in his essay, “Hantaï/Villeglé and the Dialectics of Painting’s Dispersal,” in La Peinture après l’abstraction, 1955–1975 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1999) means it to indicate Ach alma manetro’s prescient presentation that “even painting itself would have now to face the inexorable necessity to adapt to a universal condition of desublimito- ry iterability” and could therefore not disengage from either the dictates of spectacle or the instru- mentality of advertising. See p. 11. 6. See Paul Bernelle, Des Restrictions apportées depuis 1881 à la liberté de l’afﬁchage (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1912), pp. 25–27, and Marcel Fitoussi, L’Afﬁchage (Paris: PUF, 1995). Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé. Ach alma manetro. 1949. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. 76 OCTOBER

inadvertently lend support to any particular product, and no particular viewpoint or product would gain authority over another by virtue of its placement on an official building. The ultimate guarantee of the freedoms protected by this clause was that it became illegal to tear down or deface those posters that had been properly Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 placed, and so both political and product propaganda became protected in their right to proliferate on the street. As with most of the progressive legislation enacted by the Third Republic, the law’s promotion of the freedom of expression and other civic liberties was deeply intertwined with the commercial expansion— especially in advertising and real estate—that would over the course of the next one hundred years radically transform the very nature of the same civic liberties and the same public sphere they were originally meant to protect. By naming their exhibition of décollages after this law, Hains and Villeglé fore- grounded the contentious nature of the work’s public origins as well as the potentially subversive (and certainly illegal) nature of the lashes and gashes against the government-protected propagandistic culture from whence the material of their art had come. At the same time, they also downplayed the significance of the formal qualities of the work and the specific dialogue with painterly abstraction that have since been mistakenly mobilized to determine the place of décollage within the history of post-World War II French art.7 In short, rather than present itself as an introspective meditation on the esoteric reach of aesthetic debates or the visual pleasures on which many of these debates focused, from the moment of this first exhibition, décollage announced its concerns as firmly rooted in questions regarding the possibilities of public expression, especially as they become related to its encroachment in the urban spaces of the postwar period. Four years and only a handful of exhibitions later, Hains further concretized the publicly determined and socially minded agenda of décollage in a solo exhibition at Pierre and Jeanine Restany’s Galerie J. For this June 1961 show—in which Villeglé made a nominal appearance in the form of two early collaborations— Hains selected twenty décollages from the extensive bulk of his accumulated production from 1951–61 and called them collectively La France déchirée: France torn-apart, ripped-up, ruined. To be sure, the exhibition’s focus on the French nation at war—and indeed, in 1961 France was very much still at war, however much after-the-fact appellations like “postwar” assert otherwise—maintains the

7. The artists’ own current preoccupation with the formal concerns of abstraction has also contributed to this dehistoricized appreciation of décollage’s significance. Until recently, both Hains and Villeglé have continued to make décollage, though both have incorporated it into a larger arsenal of art- making practices. After fifty years, décollage seems to have devolved into little more than a market-hardy “style.” Under the very different conditions of contemporary urban life, it is doubtful that décollage’s claims to engaging with the conditions of public expression continue to be valid. Hains’s more recent, non-décollage practices capitulate to a desire to make art and life not only interrelated, but synonymous and identical. In so doing, Hains parallels cities and spaces with language, rendering both historical and everyday spatial experiences no more significant than the puns and wordplays that he draws from them in the fortuitous and whimsical narratives he weaves from their proper names. See, for example, Hains’s site-specific installation at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (1994) or his partic- ipatory performance at Documenta 10 (1997). Of the Public Born 77

1957 exhibition’s concern with public expression within the space of the city. This time, however, the domination of the city’s public space by political and commercial propaganda finds redress in Hains’s mobilization of aesthetic practices—in

particular what he describes as a synthesis of “l’art gesturel, l’abstraction expression- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 iste, et du lettrisme”—to document the existence (if not the actual expression) of an underrepresented populace in these same public spaces.8 As with the 1957 exhibition, the title of La France déchirée provides an important directive, pointing us toward Hains’s continued preoccupation with the possibilities of public expression, but now naming this concern as more specifically located within not only the realm of urban space, but also those “spaces” designated as the public sphere.9 In particular, the title directs our attention toward Hains’s interest in the contemporary print media and the institutionalized, party politics about which it attempts to engage its readers. As contemporary audiences would not have failed to recognize, Hains had appropriated his title from Le Monde journalist Jacques Fauvet’s 1957 popular, book-length analysis of the sweeping ideological rifts Fauvet claimed were responsible for not only the unraveling of the Fourth Republic, but for having plagued the French nation throughout its history.10 Relying on the thematic pun that links his work to Fauvet’s title, Hains’s appropriation of this phrase forges an equivalent relationship between France, a nation torn in Fauvet’s analysis, and the posters, torn in Hains’s décollage by a nation of French subjects. The resulting double entendre suggests that the material tears to the posters can be seen as representing the same conflicts that tore at the nation.11 In June 1961, these conflicts—repeatedly named in the textual fragments of the lacerated posters and grounded in the temporal dimension of their making— spun out of the once gradual but now rapid and violent disintegration of France’s colonial empire. Of particular concern were the social, political, and economic

8. “Raymond Hains, décolleur d’afﬁches,” Le Journal de Paris, June 25, 1961, p. 3. Given the late date of 1961, Hains’s inclusion of lettrisme in the list of his inﬂuences must be read as more complicated than the references to abstraction and gestural art, given that Isidore Isou’s tactics had long lost the sheen of validity still ascribed to gestural and abstract expressionism. Hains’s continued interest in the physical appearance of the lacerated letters visible on the surfaces of many décollages, however, speaks to the legacy of what I have characterized elsewhere as the Lettriste project of trying to draw from these fragmented signs the means to generate a universal and hence legitimately public means to access the “unspeakable” of contemporary history. 9. In the wake of Jürgen Habermas’s pioneering 1962 work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), the phrase “public sphere” has come to represent a shape-shifting agglomeration of media and representational institutions, metaphorically (and sometimes regrettably) abstracted to assume a set of spatial deliminations. 10. Jacques Fauvet, La France déchirée (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1957). 11. This parallel is further developed in Pierre Restany’s signed invitation to the opening, which declares: “C’est un fait (un signe des temps?): depuis plus de dix ans la France déchirée occupe un deux-pièces-cuisine à Montparnasse.” This strange statement extends beyond the literal reference to the fact that Hains (like many other Breton immigrants to the metropolis) and his collected décollages lived in Montparnasse in a small two-room apartment at 26, rue Delambre for more than ten years, to designate the larger Parisian public, privatized and displaced by the housing crisis that plagued France in the 1950s and ’60s, itself as “la France déchirée.” 78 OCTOBER

ﬁssures caused by the question of Algerian independence and the bloody, eight- year conﬂict—now simply and misleadingly referred to as the Algerian War—fought to achieve it.12 Begun in 1954, this war was fought by a plethora of players, including

not only the French military, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), other Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Algerian factions, and extremists within the French right (including the terrorist Organisation de l’Armée Secrete [OAS] responsible for a failed coup against de Gaulle’s government). The situation was further complicated by interference from the United Nations, the U.S., Soviet Russia, and a few of Algeria’s neighboring nations. For its part, the French government in 1961 tried to deflect attention from the war by referring to it as a simple “problem,” a “question,” or as “events” related to the pacification of insurrectionary uprisings. The truth was, however, that by the time of Hains’s 1961 exhibition, the debates over Algerian independence had brought the French nation to what many perceive as its second civil war in the twentieth century. (Vichy versus the Resistance being the first.) In fact, since Algeria was still a part of France, comprising three separate departements, and was technically not a colony or protectorate, the French nation had been at war with itself since the FLN’s declaration of independence on November 1, 1954, or perhaps even as early as the Sétif uprisings in 1945. Whatever the case, in 1961, three years after the “Algerian crisis” had toppled the Fourth Republic, and by the time the local terrorist actions of the OAS and the FLN had become familiar events in Parisian life, contemporary viewers could not misunderstand the meaning of Hains’s title, or fail to recognize its distance from Fauvet’s ahistorical pronouncements that had typi- cally, and indeed lamentably, refused to consider the urgent specifics of the historical moment or their relevance to the geopolitical conflicts surrounding decolonization. The only questions that remained were how the historical moment and the crisis of nations it occasioned were to be represented, by whom, and where.

The Public: Cet homme est dangereux

Upon walking into the “galerie laboratoire” that the Restanys envisioned their gallery to be, the visitor to La France déchirée would have been ﬁrst greeted by the bold graphics and jagged striations of Cet homme est dangereux (1957), a small framed décollage placed, as if either a sandwich board advertisement or a painting, on an easel-like support perched outside of and with its back to the two primary exhibition rooms.13 Thus positioned, the yellowed remnants of what had once been pasted onto city walls as an advertisement for Pierre Poujade’s right-wing newspaper, La Fraternité française, took on the function of announcing the exhibition in the manner of more traditional signage. Accordingly, the homme named by

12. As those sensitive to Algerian history post-1962 know all too well, the battle for independence was not the only Algerian War of this century. In this text, I will therefore follow recent historical schol- arship and refer to this war as either the French-Algerian War or the Algerian War for Independence. 13. See the interview with Jeanine Restany in Daniel Abadie, ed., Raymond Hains et la photographie, p. 50. Of the Public Born 79

the title would, at first glance, seem to advertise the artist, Hains, and pronounce him “dangereux” because of the threat his

exhibition posed to what Villeglé had once Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 described as the “dictature abstraite” of the contemporary art scene.14 Indeed, this attack was implicit in the painterly implications of Cet homme. Not only did its placement deliberately evoke the tradition of painterly production, but the blue and black gashes that split the surface into vacillating areas of figure and ground could not have failed to evoke Matisse’s similarly colored but differently conceived papiers découpés.15 As the layers of posters that constitute the décollage proliferate and overlap, however, so too do their meanings. These striations might also have been read more literally as a record of the violent gestures enacted against Pierre Poujade’s smiling likeness by an anonymous passerby. Indeed, these disﬁguring gashes parody the original ﬂyer’s ironic reversal of the “wanted” poster, which boasted that this man, Poujade, was dangerous because “il parle . . . il écrit . . . contre.” For the anonymous pedestrian, the man some named “Poujadolf” perhaps silences too much.16 In this reading, it is Poujade who represents a danger divested of the ironic playfulness celebrated by the original poster and it is to this end that Hains’s appropriation positions him. Contemporary critics found these two possible readings to be mutually exclusive. For the most part, they understood

14. See Villeglé, “In illo tempore.” 15. Buchloh has named an interest in reversing the preoccupations of Matisse’s cutouts as one of many possible epistemes of postwar painting. While this particular décollage is not among those he con- siders, it certainly supports this hypothesis. 16. Robert Gildea, France Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 42. Poujadisme has reincarnated itself in the ﬁgure of Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose populist politics hinge on the same fears of the immigrant (largely North African) Other and the economic as well as socio-political threat he is thought to pose to the French and the “French way of life.”

Top: Hains. Cet homme est dangereux. 1957. Bottom: Cet homme est dangereux, installed at La France déchirée, Galerie J., Paris, June 1961. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. 80 OCTOBER

décollage to be either an exclusive comment about the aesthetic possibilities that abstraction in speciﬁc and painting in general presented to post-World War II cultural expression or one about the social and political signiﬁcance of the lacer-

ated texts that the décollage preserved. Never was it suggested that the two Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 approaches might implicate and build upon each other to form a third reading. In an original 1961 review of the exhibition published in Les Lettres Françaises, the established critic Raoul-Jean Moulin, for example, wrote that while Hains did seem interested in (or more specifically, that he gained “pleasure from”) the words and phrases rendered by the lacerations, his exhibition was, in the end, entirely given over to aesthetics and therefore presented no political point of view. Moulin’s condemnation of the exhibition for its refusal to articulate one single statement regarding Hains’s “façon de voir les choses,” (i.e., the war over Algerian independence) stemmed from his inability to see any possibility of political commit- ment beyond those manifest in direct denunciation.17 To such a limited estimation, Hains’s recourse to the autonomous expression of aesthetics was inde- cent given the urgency of the war that dominated the exhibition as both subject and as context. Art and politics thus perpetually separate, it was impossible for Moulin to situate the works in relation to the much larger questions of public expression and historical representation that the exhibition as a whole raised. Certain among today’s critics have inherited Moulin’s inability to see past the imaginary boundaries of a political/aesthetic divide, even when they don’t share his disparaging conclusions. Instead, they celebrate what they perceive to have been Hains’s deliberate and successful dialogue with a set of assumptions about visuality. For example, Catherine Francblin states that Hains was only interested in the visual aspects of the lacerated posters and not in fact in anything the original texts said, or could be made to say.18 In such a reading, the critic’s own interest in the exceedingly visual domain of the art work precludes a more careful consideration of décollage in the very explicit urban, social, and political contexts of both its making and its presentation. In particular, Francblin’s assumptions occlude Hains’s insistence on this particular set of objects as dedicated to the debates and conflicts occasioned by colonial war. Further, her aesthetic bias deters her from questioning the relevance of Hains’s extremely significant refusal to allow any of the work exhibited in La France déchirée to be sold, despite worry voiced by the Restanys.19 The shared estimation that décollage’s final object of critique lies no deeper than the surface of its pictorial field owes more than a certain debt—even if often unintended—to Pierre Restany, the décollagistes’ most famous critic and sometimes gallerist. Desperately anxious to separate the work of those artists he joined together

17. Raoul-Jean Moulin, “Raymond Hains,” Les Lettres françaises, June 22, 1961. 18. Catherine Francblin, Les Nouveaux réalistes (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 1997), p. 39. 19. See Claude Rivière, “Malraux, est-il trahi par ses clercs?,” Combat 12 (October 1959), n.p., as well as Restany’s invitation to La France déchirée where it is asserted that for Hains, “le déchirement” of the nation and the posters that demonstrate it “ont déjà couté trop cher!” Of the Public Born 81

and championed as nouveaux réalistes— Arman, César, Dufrêne, Hains, Klein, Raysse, Spoerri, and Villeglé—from the morass of abstract painting characteristic Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 of the period and to assign an organizing principle to their strange union, Restany explicitly states that décollage morphed out of the lessons Hains had learned from the abstract patterns of his photographies hypna- gogiques, photographs of everyday objects, statues, and even texts that Hains “liber- ated” from the “burden” of mimetic representation through the distorting grooves of a channeled-glass lens he called a hypnagogiscope.20 In his after-the-fact explanation of nouveau réalisme, Restany explains that Hains experienced a revela- tion the moment he first saw the “exploded typography” of the lacerated street poster (yet another origin myth). Thus inspired, he understood that the image itself was inherently susceptible to defraction by the real and needed no help from the hand (or tool, in the case of photography) of the artist. The appropriation of lacerated posters was, according to 20. Pierre Restany, Le Nouveau réalisme (Paris: Collection 10/18, 1978), p. 50. For more on these photographs, see Raymond Hains, “Quand la photographie devient l’objet,” Photo Almanach Prisma 5 (1952).

Restany, the next logical step in Hains’s artistic trajectory, a kind of literalization of the photograph’s inherently readymade qualities. Rendered as such, décollage was not only made to fit within the parameters of nouveau réalisme, it was

anachronistically set up to demonstrate the “nouvelles approches perceptives du Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 réel” that would come to define the group’s association and to enable its aesthetic platform born in equal parts from abstraction and an appropriative realism.21 Nowhere was the “réel” that might be defined as historical circumstance or experience accounted for in this explanation of décollage’s motivational logic. Even a cursory glance at the posters that ended up “décollaged” in this 1961 exhibition, including the very different Paix en Algérie (1956), Le 13 mai (1958), Négocier, négocier (1958), C’est ça le rénouveau? (1959), Comité pour la paix en Algérie (1960), and De Gaulle veut un bain de sang, il l’aura (1961), however, dispels such willful decontextualization. As their titles indicate, all these works evoke the events and debates of the French-Algerian War. Moreover, while the textual fragments from which these titles are drawn are—like those that named Ach alma manetro—clearly legible, these works differ from the 1949 “discovery” in that the text now clearly dominates the visual field to the exclusion of color patterning. Far from representing the views of marginal or illegal terrorist organizations, as critics such as Robert Fleck have argued in efforts to assert the political courage of

21. See the signed declaration of the Nouveau Réalistes, October 27, 1960.

Hains’s exhibition, these posters stem from the realm of ofﬁcial publicity.22 As with the example of the lacerated ﬂyer that comprises Hains’s Cet homme and which was originally an announcement for La Fraternité française, the décollaged

posters are all either newspaper broadsheets, political party announcements, or, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 significantly, electoral posters. In sum, they are all tools of the bourgeois public sphere exactly as Habermas defines it. In particular, a majority of the décollages exhibited in La France déchirée were made from political announcements and advertisements mounted and torn during the electoral campaigns that accompanied the French-Algerian War, specifically the referenda through which it might be said—without wanting to diminish the very significant reliance upon military might and torture—that de Gaulle fought the war against not only the Algerians but also the dissenting factions of his own army. Holding off a more careful discussion of these referenda and their relationship to formulating and representing a national public for the moment, it is worth describing the poster campaigns that accompanied them. So great was the effort to publicize the politics of the moment that, as one observer describes it, “the most extraordinary spectacle of the campaign was the sea of posters. . . . In repeti- tion and color, this campaign eclipsed the advertisements for detergents and beverages. For the first time in France, the poster artists contributed intensively to an electoral campaign. Even the most distracted citizen would have had difficulty not noticing such a deployment of means.”23 On highways, in the city, everywhere voters traveled, colored posters dominated the landscape, encouraging simply “Oui à la France.” The soaring symbols of de Gaulle’s self-promotion eclipsed not only the usual business of buying and selling soap and coffee, but, even more significantly for Hains’s exhibition, the facts of colonial domination by evoking not only such predictable images of smiling Algerians interacting with the French, but also the “V” (now for the Fifth Republic) for Victory symbol of the general’s famous triumph as leader of the French Resistance.

22. Robert Fleck, “Raymond Hains,” in Raymond Hains: Akzente 1949–1995 (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1995), p. 67. The truth is that not only were FLN and OAS posters not the primary constituent of Hains’s décollage, they also did not exist on the streets of Paris with nearly the frequency that Fleck imagines (before the 1961 formation of the OAS, OAS posters didn’t exist at all). As Laurent Gervereau reminds, “Le FLN, à notre connaissance et pour des raisons évidentes de moyens et de sécurité, n’a pas pratiqué vraiment d’affichage.” See “Des Bruits et de silences: cartographie des representations de la guerre d’Algérie,” La France en Guerre d’Algérie, Novembre 1954–Juillet 1962, ed. Laurent Gervereau, Jean-Pierre Rioux, and Benjamin Stora (Paris: BDIC, 1992), p. 181. During the Nazi occupation of Paris, similar concerns for safety made Resistance posting difficult to the point that it was hardly employed. Interestingly, however, public dissent was frequently man- ifested by tearing down or through official Nazi posters, often at great risk. See Pierre Bourget and Charles Lacretelle, Sur les murs de Paris, 1940–1944 (Paris: Hachette, 1959), as well as Gervereau’s La Propagande par l’affiche (Paris: Styros, 1991). My gratitude is due Laure Barbizet and Fabienne Dumont at the Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine for taking the time to show me their ample archive of political and electoral posters that lined the streets of Paris during the months surrounding the important referenda of 1958 and 1961. 23. “Le Referendum de septembre et l’élection de novembre 1958,” Cahiers de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1958. Translation mine. 84 OCTOBER

The realities of such urban, electoral advertising help to establish the terrain, literal and metaphorical, from which Hains collected the posters Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 that would come to represent La France déchirée. Unlike most of the décollages that Hains made, with and without Villeglé, those that he exhibited in this 1961 show were specifically and deliberately not from advertisements for consumer products, as demonstrated above. As such, the décollage in La France déchirée suggests that while we cannot locate décollage’s political intervention in a direct denunciation of specific practices (i.e., torture, assassination), so too we cannot limit its political engagement to an exclusive critique of spectacular society and advanced consumerism, as has been asserted by Benjamin Buchloh, Thomas Crow, and Roberto Ohrt, to name a few.24 For Buchloh, such a “Oui” referendum electoral poster, 1961. critique and the distanced terms of its articulation were in fact all that remained available to the postwar neo-avant-gardes as a result of the perceived transformation of the public sphere and public space. However, such an argument errs by occluding not only the object of Hains’s critique, but significantly a consideration of the ways in which décollage actually attempted to renegotiate these spaces—and the political spheres that fed into and from them—in order to enter into renewed dialogue with the historical specificities of the time. While the streets of Paris were plastered with political party advertisements guiding voters toward voting “oui” or “non” in de Gaulle’s referenda or urging readers to purchase this newspaper or join that party, it should also be noted that the French press seemed relatively disengaged from the project of comprehen- sively representing the divisive issues at the heart of these elections. To be sure, throughout the post-World War II period, the whole fact and function of newspaper circulation in France had changed drastically, and readership across the board had plummeted precipitously. Fewer and fewer people read fewer and fewer papers, and readership only began to rise in the late 1950s in conjunction with the increased distribution of only those four papers that were least concerned with political debate: France-Soir, Parisien-Liberé, L’Aurore, and Le Figaro.25 To this

24. See Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), and Roberto Ohrt, “Raymond Hains: Un visiteur de passage,” in Raymond Hains: Akzente 1949–1995. 25. In 1946, 16 million French read a daily paper whereas only 10 million did in 1952. See William Of the Public Born 85

newly reconﬁgured, subscription-driven press, the subject of Algerian independence and the battles being fought

against it was not a principle concern. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Of all the postwar press, Le Monde, Paris’s left-center daily, demonstrated the highest incidence of representing news from the Algerian war on its front page, and that at the astonishingly low rate of less than 14 percent throughout the whole eight-year period. L’Humanité, the official organ of the Communist party, came in second with less than a meager 9 percent of its covers mention- ing the war.26 Large parts of the war in Algeria, and certainly a great amount of the carnage, was practically removed from the public’s eye in a stark contrast to the way in which representations of the Vietnam War in the U.S. simultaneously inured people to the devastation of war and provided the stimulus to act Le Journal d’Alger, 1960. out against it. It was as if, to borrow the metaphor used by Benjamin Stora, the war had been excised like a gangrene- infected limb from the body politic.27 Intellectuals debated how the unfolding of events in Algeria would shape their future commitments and the possibility of engagement, but such debates did not “trickle down,” at least not much or at ﬁrst, into venues directed at the public.28

G. Andrews, French Politics and Algeria: The Process of Policy Formation 1954–1962 (New York: Meredith Publishing, 1962), p. 24. 26. Andrews, French Politics and Algeria, p. 27. Censorship and ﬁnancially motivated self-censorship account for some aspects of this underreporting. News publications such as those cited here were frequently subject to governmental seizure and all “offending” reportage was excised. Most newspapers and magazines ran the censored issues with blank pages where the original articles had been. These glaring white pages present an interesting complication to our thinking about the place of such “blankness” within the history of modernist visual production as it is currently theorized. On the history of censorship, see Clyde Thogmartin, The National Daily Press of France (Birmingham, Al.: Summa Publications, Inc., 1998); Nicholas Harrison, Censorship and Its Metaphors in French History, Literature, and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); and Michael Scriven, “Les Intellectuels et les médias: De la censure à l’autocensure,” Franco-British Studies: The Journal of the British Institute in Paris (Spring 1990), pp. 77–85. 27. See Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Éditions de la Découverte, 1991). 28. Several of these debates have become quite celebrated due to the famous names attached to them, often to the exclusion of equally vital discussions, such as those proposed by numerous Algerians themselves. James Le Sueur has recently dismantled Henry Judt’s claims about the relative unimpor- tance of the Algerian War of Independence for a generation of postwar intellectuals, insisting that 86 OCTOBER

When we are reminded that the décollages in La France déchirée come from, as Cet homme intimates, and exist as remnants of only that kind of advertisement that hawks the electoral platform of a political party, we begin to understand the ways

in which instead of retreating from the public, these works very specifically Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 engaged with rethinking and reactivating space for public engagement both within art and within the space of the city. In fact, the political potential of décollage and the lessons it has for today’s practitioners lie less with presenting a specific political objection to any particular facts of historical reality (here, the French occupation of Algeria and the divisive politics that the threat of Algerian Independence were to engender in the French nation) than with actively questioning the capacity of the so- called public institutions it represents to reflect—as opposed to dictate—the experience of a nation and its people throughout this historical reality. In this way, Hains’s La France déchirée parallels the kind of curiosity and critique that fueled Habermas to develop his own account of the demise of the public sphere. However, Hains’s investigation avoids Habermas’s pessimistic conclusions despite a willingness to name all the same players: the media, the political parties, and the conditions of public gathering. As Habermas would do in print, the torn surfaces of Hains’s décollaged posters plunged into the depths of the relationship between the average person, political representation, and the media, especially as this relationship was enacted in the public space of the street at the site of these posted announcements. If the street had once figured as the site par excellence of Enlightened debate in the Revolutionary assemblies of the late eighteenth century, then it was in reference to this space that the crisis occasioned by the radical and perceptible challenges to institutionalized claims about universality that had resulted from the destabilizing experiences of World War II and the facts of decolonization—not to mention France’s accelerated thrust into the new world order of global consumption—would have to be addressed.29 Returning to Hains’s Cet homme and remaining within these parameters, it now becomes possible to imagine a third, and different, referent for the subject of Cet homme’s address. In opposition to great, heroic figures—political leaders like Poujade (to some) or de Gaulle (to others), or even men like the artist (for Restany) credited with being capable of reinventing art and along with it human expressivity—there exists the anonymous homme or femme of the public responsible

intellectuals not only played a defining role in the French-Algerian War, but that the war itself became the defining moment of intellectual self-identification in the post–World War II period, forcing many intellectuals to reconsider their earlier commitments to the disengaged concepts of the Other current at the end of World War II. See Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and Mouloud Feraoun, Journal, 1955–1965: Reflections on the French-Algerian War, ed. James D. Le Sueur, trans. Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 29. See James A. Leith, Space and Revolution: Projects for Monuments, Squares, and Public Buildings in France 1789–1799 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), for an historical analysis of some of these spaces and the ways in which the plans for monumental architecture inculcated the Enlightenment ideals of the Revolution within new formulations of its public as a public specifically and exclusively of citizens. Of the Public Born 87

for having lacerated the posters in the ﬁrst place. It is he or she who, as Kristin Ross suggests in her description of the 1871 toppling of the symbolic register built into la colonne Vendôme, engages in acts of destruction in order to refuse “the dominant

organization of social space and the supposed neutrality” of monuments and other Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 ofﬁcially sanctioned sites by ripping down and through the advertisements and political announcements that dominated the urban landscape.30 This man, an “everyman” positioned within the remaining public space of the street, is dangerous, Hains warns, precisely because he has not acquiesced to an imposed representation of his own experience within the realm of the public sphere. Not just a passive consumer of the image of the city and its history, he acts upon his environment, leaving traces of his passage, if not also his resistance.31

30. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 39. This symbolism of destruction goes back even further in French history to 1793, when the Conseil Générale de la Commune issued a decree for the public to destroy royal statues and monuments. 31. Hains had earlier commented on this passivity encouraged by the modern city, not only when he framed the collection of décollage he and Villeglé exhibited in 1957 under the rubric of the governmental protection of both real-estate and advertising interests suggested by the title Le loi du 29 juillet 1881 but also—and rather spectacularly—in his 1959 contribution to André Malraux’s first Biennale de Paris: La Palissade des emplacements réservées. In taking this twenty-five-foot-high stretch of wooden fencing from the street of Paris (where he had purchased it from construction workers) and inserting it into the middle of an art exhibition meant by Malraux to demonstrate France’s cultural ascendancy, Hains was either denouncing one kind of high art practice—the figurative painting that dominated

With La France déchirée’s appearance on the visible space of the walls of the gallery, this everyman ﬁnds a tenuous kind of agency in décollage. The archived trace of his or her actions on the posters preserved in the ﬂaky layers of décollage

dislodges the fact of his or her existence from the privatized, routinized transit Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 through the city to the dull pace of dodo, métro, boulot, and recasts him or her as a visible public. To be, in the 1950s and 1960s was, after all, to be seen (with apolo- gies to Bishop Berkeley).32 As anonymous and undetermined acts of vandalism, the lacerated posters from which décollage is made had been unextraordinary, even invisible. They had not yet entered into what Hannah Arendt would term, in her 1958 precursor to Habermas’s study, the “space of appearance.”33 For Arendt, this “space” designates a symbolic political realm akin to Habermas’s public sphere where private persons engage in matters of public interest. Departing, however, from Habermas’s conception of the similar arenas of discourse and debate, Arendt’s account lends itself to a more pronounced interest in the visual manifestations of action and presence as opposed to those centered around speech and writing. This insistence on the importance of the visual and, certainly, the con- cretely spatial, within the construction of the public is crucial because it permits (or it did during the period) forms of political representation that are not restricted to the increasingly closed-off realms of such discursive enterprises as print media and the advertising constituencies that feed it. Under the guidelines established by Arendt’s criteria—visibility within a spatial construct—political recognition becomes a possibility through the interactions with the physical spaces of the city and especially with the complex visual cultures—such as décollage—that it fosters. Importantly, public participation is determined by the fact of being seen, and not by being able to see, as urbanists since the Enlightenment had hoped in their ambition to redesign the city as a rational whole to be contemplated from a subjective point of view. Hains’s insistence that “Je suis un ravisseur d’affiches déchirées par les pas- sants” thus appropriately strips the artist of an opportunity to profit from the expression of his own interiority (as the Surrealists did) or even to indict the market institutions that enable such valorizations (as Marcel Duchamp did).34 Redefined, the artist becomes little more than a collector and art itself becomes an

the Biennale—in favor of another—the readymade or possibly even an emergent concept of site-spe- ciﬁc art; or, more compellingly, he was challenging the exclusion of “the real,” as it happened not only in the exhibition but in urban space as well. For indeed, on the street, the palissade served the primary purpose of blocking from view the ugly holes and ruined structures that evidenced the changes to which the city of Paris was being put, changes that worked to make the capital better suited to the new postcolonial and cosmopolitan conditions of the twentieth century. 32. Such at least was the argument of much roughly contemporary discourse about the conﬁgura- tion of subjectivity vis-à-vis the gaze of the other. Consider, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Look” from Being and Nothingness (1953) and Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, especially in its late 1940s elaborations. 33. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 199. 34. Pariscope, November 17, 1996, n.p. Of the Public Born 89

archeological, communal action. To be clear, the décollagistes carefully separate this utopia from the Beuysian gesture of “everyman is an artist,” insisting instead that art must be made “by all and not by one.”35 While this concept was borrowed from the

Surrealists (and from Lautréamont before them), the crucial difference lies in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Hains’s insistence on making art an involuntary process and the “all” responsible for its production not just a group of artists but, in effect, the largest possible public.36 As a trace of such a public and evidence of the disruption they might cause, however symbolically, the décollages in La France déchiree succinctly register Hains’s effort to allow the public to represent itself as a public. Given the historical exigen- cies of the particular moment in which the specific works under consideration here were made and exhibited, we have to consider the potential of this gesture within the history of the public during the Algerian War and isolate it as evidence of a will to refuse the interested representations of the government or the official realm of political publicity. Indeed, the battle to represent the “everyman” of the French public, to speak for him and even determine precisely who he is and from which class he comes, had been an important constituent of French politics since the Revolution, when the embodiment of the nation was first transferred from the king to the people, or rather, the men of France. It became something of an obses- sion during the post-World War II period, when legislative reform joined both political and financial mobility to transform the French electorate at the same time that the memory of the Popular Front began to disengage itself from the failed ambitions of Blum’s coalition government and the stakes of decolonization began to manifest themselves to the French nation with the decisive defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

Direct Democracy and Other Myths of Representation

This investment in speaking for the public, and particularly a national public designated as such by the rights of citizenship, led President Charles de Gaulle to initiate four referenda as a means to secure the validity of his plans for the fate of Algeria. Upon ﬁrst seizing the reins of the government in 1958, de Gaulle took to the task of writing a new constitution. The referendum he held to approve this new constitution was a matter of French law; there was no other (peaceful) way a new constitution could be adopted. The subsequent referenda of 1961 and 1962 had different implications, although even the September 28, 1958, referendum to

35. See Jacques de la Villeglé, “L’Afﬁche lacerée: Ses successives immixtions dans les arts,” Leonardo 2 (1969), pp. 33–44, and the extended essay, “Léo Malet,” in Urbi & Orbi. 36. In the 1938 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, Léo Malet, a Surrealist-poet-turned-detective-novel- ist, had deﬁned décollage as “the process which consists of tearing off portions of a poster so as to reveal parts of another (or others) which it covers and to speculate on the feeling of oddity and uneasiness that the resulting ensemble produces.” Through such collaborative projects, Malet imagined that artists could collaborate with mass production in order to turn the cityscape into a vast arena of artistic discovery. See “La clé du champ de manœuvres: 1. Lithophagisme de la poésie,” Leonardo 2 (1969), p. 419. 90 OCTOBER

approve de Gaulle’s proposed constitution and its newly empowered executive branch was largely promoted as a means to resolve the Algerian “crisis” by strengthening the French presidency and accordingly the nation. That 90 percent

of those who voted did so in favor of de Gaulle’s new constitution would seem to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 indicate an overwhelming consensus among French citizens. However, a full 25 percent of the electorate abstained, refusing even to honor the implications of the new constitution’s reconceptualization of the state. The question of who this electorate was is one of great significance, since the efforts to redefine this national public would profoundly influence the outcome of the French-Algerian War. Since the 1848 declaration that Algeria was part of France, indigenous and immigrant populations to the lands north of the Sahara had been petitioning for the right to participate in French politics under the same terms as all other citizens residing within the remainder of the French departments. Fearful that such rights would result in a situation wherein main- land France would eventually be governed by the majority rule of the Algerian and Saharan populations, every successive French government denied this right— if not always in the letter of the law, then through its administration.37 By the time of the Fifth Republic, however, the right to representation was chief among the Algerians’ complaints with France. De Gaulle had to face the fact that if Algeria were to be maintained as part of France, it would be at the cost of several million Muslim votes and a resulting majority in the French Sénat. The choice was thus clear: Algeria would have to be let go. But it would have to be the public that would make that choice, or at least seem to. The costs of doing it any other way had already proven to be too great for the unity of the French nation. To this end, de Gaulle made a carefully orchestrated media display (he even went on television) of promising to let the Algerian populations, both indigenous and European, vote on the series of referenda that would eventually decide their fate. Such a promise was made even more significant by virtue of the fact that all other public liberties, including the right to vote in local elections for the already powerless Algerian Assembly, the freedom of the press, and the right to congre- gate or move freely in the city, had been suspended in Algeria since early 1957 (and all but didn’t exist for the population of musulmans français in the metro- pole). The second referendum of de Gaulle’s administration—and the one which was most relevant for the context in which the visitor to Hains’s 1961 exhibition would have received his work—was held on January 8, 1961, and asked the eligible voters in France and Algeria to register their approval or disapproval of the plan de Gaulle had already submitted “concerning the self-determination of the

37. Space does not allow a more thorough investigation of the very complicated and surprisingly under-investigated history of electoral rights in French Algeria. See Claude Collot, Les Institutions de l’Algérie durant la periode coloniale, 1830–1962 (Algiers and Paris: CNRS/Office des Publications Universitaires, 1987); Louis-Augustin Barriere, “Le Puzzle de la citoyenneté en Algérie,” Plein droit 29–30 (November 1995); and Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacré du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Of the Public Born 91

Algerian populations and the organization of the public powers in Algeria prior to self-determination.” In effect, de Gaulle asked the voting public to vote for or against his idea of the nation and its powers. His plan regarding Algeria’s future

suggested the restoration of the full exercise of public liberties in Algeria as soon as Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 it was safe to do so. Only after such civil liberties were restored did de Gaulle propose to allow the Algerian people to vote on the question of their own independence. In the referendum, however, de Gaulle asked people not only to support or refuse this plan for eventual independence, but simultaneously to uphold the continued executive and legislative rule of Algeria in terms beneficial to French interests until the proposed self-determination had been effected, in other words, until he himself decided otherwise. The contradiction between the intentions manifest in the two halves of the referendum confused many voters, who due to the two-pronged aspect of the vote were unable to approve only part of de Gaulle’s proposition. The consensus de Gaulle sought would not only smooth over different opinions and minor hesitations, it would totally erase any record of dissent.38 Thus, it would have been with a certain sense of déjà vu that the visitor to Hains’s exhibition at the Galerie J. in June 1961 would have seen the décollage, C’est ça le rénouveau? (1959) and the reconfigured call for a vote that it presented. A much more complicated composition than Cet homme, C’est ça finds as its center an upended apostrophe snatched from the heart of what had been originally posted as an advertisement for a Communist-supported campaign to augment workers’ salaries. This assault to the original integrity of the poster interrupts a layer of black text detailing the costs of day-to-day life in order to expose a segment of blue text belonging to another buried poster. The text from this exposed segment reads “Vote,” the familiarity of the “tu” form rendered with another tear to the poster material and the subsequent disappearance of the “z” that would complete the more formal “Votez.” Beneath that, from yet another poster, badly scratched segments of the words “La France” stand next to the last half of the word “Indochine” poking through. The round end of the apostrophe reveals still a fifth layer of text, dense typography from which only the words “Du parti” remain wholly legible. The work’s title comes from the original heading of the Communist party flyer, “C’est ça le rénouveau?” (originally intended to suggest an ironic indictment of de Gaulle’s new government and its failure to produce real economic change). In their historical context, however, these words take new meaning from the resonance of the unearthed “Indochine.” Framed within the exhibition by nineteen other décollages all presenting materials directly relating to the colonial wars of the 1950s, this question could not have failed to evoke an ironic parallel between the unmemorialized and humiliating 1954 defeat at Dien

38. The third referendum, in April 1962, asked the French voting populace, but significantly not the Algerian one, to approve the Evian Agreement made with the FLN in March and to grant de Gaulle the powers necessary to implement it. The fourth and final referendum was actually not held in France at all but in Algeria, under the authority of the Algerian Provisional Executive in accordance with the stipulations of the Evian Agreement. This vote confirmed independence 5,975,581 to 16,534. 92 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

Bien Phu and the contemporary unnamed crisis in Algeria, asking if this were the new beginning the nation had been promised in return for bringing de Gaulle back to power in 1958. Once initiated, this question and the historical comparisons it trig- gers cascade backwards across the twentieth century. Given de Gaulle’s prominence in World War II as well as the historical parallels between the two moments marked by the appearance of two separate Frances—what, after all, was de Gaulle’s London government, if not a displaced France?—this cascade ultimately situates the unnamed war in Algeria within the context of its originary twin: World War II.39 Within the context of the public sphere during the years of France’s colonial wars, the nonsensical phrase at the center of C’est ça?—“vote Indochine contre la France”—manifests a direct challenge to precisely the kind of publicity-driven politics that the referendum proposed, asking ironically if this too had really changed

39. Indeed, in literal ways, the Algerian War reignited the conﬂict in Indochina, where France had striven to preserve the colonial government in territory recently declared independent after the allied victory over Japan. Of course, the historical differences are paramount, but the continuity remains important. For instance, many of the draftees called upon to serve in Algeria were those who had just returned from the humiliating defeat in Indochina. This recall occasioned the ﬁrst and (ultimately most potent) wave of opposition to and strikes against the French-Algerian War. Of the Public Born 93

and if de Gaulle’s national public, a public organized around the French community (the Fifth Republic’s new euphemism for what had once been known as Empire and then, optimistically, Union) was really any more inclusive. The ﬂuid discourses

of the media and the political machines that feed it are disturbed or, to borrow a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 term from the Situationists’ lexicon, détourné, in order to enable a parodic representation of the tainted medium of political representation. Through the unwitting juxtaposition of words that interrupt each other from layers of buried posters, the discursive machinery of propaganda meant to corral human experience into a general and generalizable public is jammed. Conversely, by having made this impossible vote available through the ripping and tearing of posters, the anonymous lacerator, or “involuntary artist” as Hains has called him, finds a way to record his or her own experience in the limiting field of history as determined by the media machine. In this way, he or she is made to engage in what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge have tried to designate as an alternative public sphere, one based not on the alienating consumption of the publicly distributed descriptions of experience that constitute the mass media, but on the production of alternative discourses, no matter how small or how ephemeral.40 Even more specifically, given its garbled reconfiguration as a call for a vote, C’est ça le rénouveau? generates a debate otherwise absent from both the dominant print media and the electoral propaganda that had colorfully lined the streets of Paris during the elections and referenda that became so pivotal to the Algerian War. Indeed, only in such a context can the call—newly reissued here to the dangerous “cet homme” of the public—to vote “against” France and “for” or “against” (depend- ing on how you understand the directive) Algeria, the Indochina of 1959, be recast in a critical fashion. Exactly such an absurd vote had already served to define the parameters of a false public through the illusions of the 1961 referendum. C’est ça?’s incitement to vote “contre la France” resonates specifically with the implications of this referendum, mimicking its pretensions to presenting both an actual question and to forming a representational governmental response. By reimagining the vote in the impossible terms suggested by the indexical marks of dissent that had first enabled C’est ça?’s composition, Hains makes the décollage point to the nonrepresen- tative aspect of the referendum and illuminate its bogus plea. Estranged from an association with the representative practices of democratic government, the referenda surrounding the Algerian War are repositioned as yet one more faulty component of a public sphere intent on creating the illusion of consensus. Through its deliberate use of a physical space to facilitate this visibility, Hains’s installation of La France déchirée makes of the gallery a portal onto Paris’s faceless

40. For Negt and Kluge this emphasis on production is a pivotal part of their response to Habermas’s conception of the public sphere under the conditions of capitalist modernity. In their lexicon, such production makes of the public sphere a “proletarian” construct, adaptable to the needs of larger publics, be they “counter” or “alternative” to the bourgeois-derived model that Habermas laments. See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksilloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 94 OCTOBER

populations, hoping thus to short-circuit the typical separation of art institution and society at large. Their engagement with the posters within the public domain of urban space should not, however, be taken as the main or even primary catalyst to

their formulation as a public. Rather, it is only the intrusive dynamic characterized Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 by décollage’s chaperoning recorded fragments of their experience into the gallery that galvanizes and even creates them as a public. Before being joined together in the décollages, these evidentiary fragments of lacerated posters hung on the hoard- ings and walls of Paris as discarded and forgotten refuse. In taking them off and re-presenting them, Hains makes of them the stuff of not only a relevant critique, but also of a public, now defined by something other than inclusion within the “imagined community” of an electorally construed national identity.41 The consequences of this action are not small in terms of our thinking about either art practices or the possibility of generating the space for productive, critical publics within urban space. Décollage gains its critical capacity through the illegibility imparted to the propaganda of official publicity as it is articulated through the traditional means of the dominant public sphere. This action trumps the continued dissemination of both political and commercial propaganda. With the laceration of the street poster, the spectator’s quotidian experience coincides with a production that mars official discourse. Located in the negation of actual political discourse or the commercial noise that threatens to encompass it, such “disruptions” stubbornly if nebulously represent the subjects who, consciously or not, choose to destroy rather than preserve the manifestations of an official publicity. When preserved and indeed “remade” as art in order to circulate within the “space of appearance” that is the gallery, these lacerated posters testify to the productive capacity of the masses and register the possibility of recording a persevering presence in the spaces made less and less available to them every day as a result of the newly configured dictates of an increasingly privatized public sphere: Don’t touch. Don’t tear. Read. Believe. Buy. And all of this precisely at a time when censorship made such engagement even within traditional media channels exceedingly difficult, when political partisanship and the climate of underinformation made public opinion polls hard to quantify, when police force and the threat of terrorist action made mass use of public space all but impossible, and when even a referendum was manipulated to function as a demonstration of unwavering political support rather than an endorsement for a particular course of action. Indeed, the profound silencing of the public at this historical moment illuminates décollage’s importance as a critique of the existing public sphere.42

41. The phrase, of course, comes from Benedict Anderson’s account of how language and litera- tures ﬁgure into the formation of national identities in Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 42. For an analysis of the public opinion polls conducted by the Institut Français d’Opinion Publique about the French-Algerian War, see Charles-Robert Ageron, “Les Français devant la guerre civile algéri- enne,” in La Guerre d’Algérie et les Français, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1990), pp. 25–44. In general, Ageron employs the recorded statistics to discredit suggestions that the French people were indifferent to the war during its most heated moments and at its resolution. In his Of the Public Born 95

So, exactly unlike Hains’s hypnagogic photographs, which rely upon the distorting capacity of a channeled lens to generate new and entirely visual realities, these works attempt to shuttle back and forth between the already existent reali-

ties of an aesthetically conceived object (the painterly composition of décollage, for Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 instance, cannot, as I suggested in the case of Cet homme, be ignored) and public discourse, asking us to see both differently and, if we extend the metaphor, asking us to see the distortions reflected by both. In this model, aesthetic practice is expanded to provide testimony to voices usually excluded from it. The possibility of an as-yet-undefined alternative public discourse, in turn, becomes visible within the legitimate and legitimating sphere of art. Indeed, much of the meaning—the textual, literal meaning—suggested by the décollages in La France déchirée stems from the fact of its context, a fact ultimately traceable to Hains’s artistic interventions, if not intentions. The very eloquence of some of La France déchirée’s pieces regarding contemporaneous historical events tends to highlight just how much meaning the artist can impart through context. After all, the primary materials of décollage are possibly acciden- tal and certainly nonsensical productions. Without context and outside the space of the gallery, they would remain profoundly meaningless. In providing a context that makes these primary materials speak, as it were, Hains indeed seems to pass off his complex positionings of these primary materials as belonging to the public. In fact, however, he produces a sophisticated fiction. Crucially, this fiction does not rest on falsities and it is, in the end, not without its own important interventions. Whether or not the real public genuinely opined that France’s colonial politics were reprehensible, or that the media oppressed it, the fact that it had only (almost) insignificant modes of expression at its disposal cannot be denied. While a ripped poster cannot be made to stand in for a political agenda or even for political consciousness, I would insist that it is this very fact that lies at the core of the experience of La France déchirée, and that Hains’s work maintains an illustra- tive sense of play between his imbuing of meaning and the meaninglessness of the ripped posters. For while Hains offers entry into the possible critical discourses that might emanate from a(n) (imaginary) public, at no time does he make either explicit or implicit claims about the real public’s consciousness. La France déchirée included no statements, within the works or in their presentation, regarding the

introduction to Le Dictionnaire des livres de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), Benjamin Stora explains that the public opinion poll was ﬁrst developed in France as a governmental strategy during precisely this period in order to appease the demands of the “public.” However, as Foucault notes in his “The Eye of Power,” matters like the public opinion poll only reinvigorate the establishment by cloak- ing it under the guise of a transparent relationship between public and private when, in fact, such pretensions to inclusion further occlude this relationship. The violent end of the Algerian protests of October 17, 1961, and the eight Communists murdered during police suppression of the anti-OAS demonstrations on February 8, 1962 at Métro Charronne are but two demonstrations of this control over public space. As for terrorist threats, it should be noted that even individuals as seemingly protected by prestige and reputation as André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre were subject to assassination plots from the extreme-right OAS. 96 OCTOBER

people’s political objectives. Instead, it claimed itself as an evidentiary account of the fact of that public. Through this positive representation, the exhibition attempted to highlight a negative space in the world of public experience.

Rather than accuse Hains of having missed an opportunity to pronounce a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115726/1751107/016228704774115726.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 grander, more articulate and politically savvy critique in the name of the margin- alized or the voice of the subaltern, we should consider that his invented art practice and the gestures it makes toward reinserting an evidentiary index of the public’s existence reveal (and preserve) a careful knowledge of the epistemologi- cal limits of not only the gallery and the art world, but the problems of representation upon which they (and modern electoral politics, too) are based. How, indeed, could Hains or the gallery visitors hope to have direct access to the “man on the street”? In eschewing a project whose goal would be addressing this Other, Hains contents himself with introducing the suspicion, if not undeniable proof, that such a person exists, while admitting the speciﬁc historical determi- nants of his/her condition into the privileged space of the gallery. Hains offers the gallery the very real specter of the man of the street, though he cannot produce a body. Thus the tension between his own contextualization and the discourses it produces on the one hand and the powerful, resilient aporia represented by his primary materials on the other comes to parallel the incompatibility of the gallery’s audience with the silent, negative double of the anonymous public. The only way in which this incompatibility—nothing less than a manifestation of the hostility of the public sphere to any but the discourses of privatization— can be addressed is through the physical emergence of this specter. Today, as in 1961, it is time for these bodies to stand up, to make themselves seen, and to be seen by others.