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Raymond Hains and La France Déchirée

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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 frag- ments 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 pro- ject 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 main- tains 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 leg- islation 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 expres- sion—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 offi- cial 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.
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