The endless theory of days : the art and poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel

165 Pages·2007·0.641 MB·English

by  Bishop, Michael, Titus-Carmel, Gérard

The Endless Theory of Days
Chiasma 22
General Editor
Michael Bishop
Editorial Committee
Adelaide Russo, Michael Sheringham,
Steven Winspur, Sonya Stephens,
Michael Brophy, Anja Pearre
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
The Endless Theory of Days
The Art and Poetry
of Gérard Titus-Carmel
Michael Bishop
Chiasma seeks to foster urgent critical assessments focusing
upon joinings and criss-crossings, single, triangular, multiple, in the
realm of modern French literature. Studies may be of an
interdisciplinary nature, developing connections with art, philosophy,
linguistics and beyond, or display intertextual or other plurivocal
concerns of varying order.

Cover illustration: Gérard Titus-Carmel: Quartier d’Hiver II.
Cover design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence".
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2165-5
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword .............................................................................................7

Chapter 1: From Hot Dogs and Bananas to Deterioration
and Alteration: Form, Idea, Being ......................................................9

Chapter 2: Joaquin’s Love Affair......................................................17

Chapter 3: The Cryptic and the Necessary, Deambulation
and Sticks...........................................................................................21

Chapter 4: From Coffins to Italiana and Riggings, Shop
Curtains and Narwa ..........................................................................27

Chapter 5: Accompanying the Other: From Chardin, Goya
and Caillebotte to Bonnard, Crane and Roud ...................................39

Chapter 6: Falling and Flowing.........................................................57

Chapter 7: The Self Accompanied: From Robbe-Grillet,
Rossi and Roche to Commère, Bancquart and Bonnefoy..................65

Chapter 8: Excavation and Forgetting, Embankment
and Abyss .........................................................................................75

Chapter 9: From Shadows, Interiors and Seasons to Cairns,
Forests and Nielli ..............................................................................95

Chapter 10: Questions of Presence and Manners of Darkness........109

Chapter 11: Leafings, Jungles and Herbarium ................................135

Chapter 12: Today ..........................................................................155

Selected Bibliography......................................................................159
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FOREWORD

“Ce monde de rosée est
un monde de rosée
pourtant et pourtant”
Issa

“… là où se nomme la beauté”
Gérard Titus Carmel

“Je jouerai tout ce que je possède,
et quand j’aurai tout perdu, je
jouerai jusqu’à mon être même”
Tagore

To speak today of the at once plastic and written work, that
continues apace, of Gérard Titus-Carmel, is to plunge into a vast and
complex universe of both turbulence and serene elegance, of intense
self-doubt and persistent affirmation of an improbably residual
purpose underpinning “the exhausting narrative of dying to which I
remain alone in testifying”. It is, moreover, a universe that has drawn
the attention of major critics and writers, this particularly, and from
the beginning, with respect to its plastic dimension, but also,
increasingly from 1987, when Titus-Carmel’s first volume of a now
very considerable poetic oeuvre appeared. To argue that Gérard
Titus-Carmel is today not only one of France’s most distinguished
and original artists but, too, one of her most powerfully moving and
eloquent poets, involves no hyperbole: it is a fact recognised by some
of (post)modernity’s finest writers and thinkers, from Jacques
Derrida, Yves Bonnefoy and Alain Robbe-Grillet to Pascal Quignard,
Jacques Dupin and Marie-Claire Bancquart. And, if Titus-Carmel’s
path may seem to have been lived and trodden in an at once fatal and
necessary solitude, we should not forget the immense pertinence, both
for himself and for others, of his numerous collaborative creations,
his critical essays and books devoted to the work and thought of
major artists and writers, and those freely meditative pieces, now
plastic, now written, where affinities and exchanges are subtly and
delicately pursued.
8 The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel
The pages that follow, written in English in a deliberate
embrace of an anglophone world so often eager to discover and
entertain distinct originalities not its own, seek, then, to set forth the
case for the special, multiple genius of a man who, despite the
experience of a biting melancholy resulting from loss, despite an
“indefectible feeling of estrangement from the world” (PA)1, despite,
too, the corrosive sense of art’s, of language’s, deceptiveness, has
never lost sight of a curious duty to the shadows that haunt and that,
with now a strangeness that smiles, yet beckon towards “the very
place, finally clarified and recognized, of pure evidence. // [The
place] that is, where beauty is named” (PA). This place, Gérard Titus-
Carmel may feel, lies no doubt impossibly beyond the locus of his art
and his writing, but it is a place that he has struggled with dignity and
unceasingly deployed energy to bring to a semblance of incarnation
in an oeuvre that has stirred, and will continue to stir, the minds and
hearts of all those who have witnessed its exquisitely solemn
unfolding over, today, more than forty years.

1 Gérard Titus-Carmel, “Portrait de l’artiste en profil perdu”: see Selected
Bibliography for all abbreviations and details of publication.
I
FROM HOT DOGS AND BANANAS TO DETERIORATION AND
ALTERATION: FORM, IDEA, BEING

The artwork of Gérard Titus-Carmel that principally focuses
my attention in this opening critical foray, all of it drawings – 25
variations sur l’ídée de rupture (1970), 20 variations sur l’idée de
détérioration (1971), 17 exemples d'altération d'une sphère (1971)
and some other pieces – is not the very earliest evidence of an
originality that will quickly draw the attention of critics,
philosophers, poets. It does constitute, however, with the work that
proceeds – Nourritures culturelles (1968-70), La grande bananeraie
culturelle (1969), the three “Olfactive operations” (1970-72) and
other work undertaken in 1970 – a powerfully and coherently woven
knot of (self-)exploration and (self-)initiation that will singularly
mark both the art and the poetry of the next thirty-five or so years.
Whilst it is true that all of this early work may involve a
radical and fertile exploration of form via a manner, or manners, that
would seem to evacuate flagrant authorialness and bestow on art an
autonomy and a sobering ambiguity of purpose, it is useful to bear in
mind a number of other factors at play from the outset. Firstly, and
most significantly – we shall shortly return to this in greater detail –,
forme and fond are never thought through in separation: to explore
form for Titus-Carmel is to question the very nature and feasibility of
our relation to being, our being-in-the-world, with others, things, via
the capacity to feel and meditate this relation. Nothing here, in short,
should be held to be dry, abstract, unlived, remote. Secondly, just as
Gérard Titus-Carmel’s drawings, despite their refusal of a
hyperrealist orientation, designate factors of manifest realness, so,
despite the chasm between his own and conceptual art, all of Titus-
Carmel’s work is a profoundly thinking, self-conscious and
terrestrially, ontologically conscious gesture. Thirdly, if it is
undoubtedly true that certain of Titus-Carmel’s creative
“mechanisms” hinge on “dismantling”, “disarticulation” and
deconstruction, the latter reminds us of the degree to which, equally,
his efforts, whether plastic or verbal – and, from the outset, the two
may be said to combine – involve a dramatic rethinking, an exalted