The title of this present by Anne Bourse is Dissociation. This phrase isn’t commonplace, quite it defines a detachment from actuality which could be interpreted in many alternative methods. In psychology, it has repercussions on reminiscence or the notion of actuality/normality. As actuality/normality is an idea that’s questionable in itself, dissociation has produced—in mythology, literature and cinema—many narratives that readily come to thoughts. Janus, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Psycho’s Norman Bates. This leads us to the double and the whole lot that its apparition produces in actuality. As every storyline involves an finish, we are sometimes struck by the truth that the 2 figures, though diametrically opposed, solely exist due to their fixed confrontation, which unites them unconditionally. Janus shouldn’t be solely the two-faced god, he’s additionally the god of doorways and passageways—of transition, thresholds. A state of shifting from one state to a different, a ritual even.
Right here, we’re in a really codified area: the up to date artwork gallery. This area is all the time roughly a model of the white dice, generalized within the Seventies. The white dice ought to clearly be white, clear and impartial, offering no context for the artwork proven inside it. A laboratory. A stage. A set. The area the place one performs, repeatedly, even an excessive amount of, with no matter one needs. “One,” on this case, is the artist, or extra significantly, is Anne Bourse. “One” as a result of it’s out of the query to digress in direction of the artist-double, a cliché inherited from Romanticism or Surrealism, strengthened by psychoanalysis. No want for “she” both, which could be barely directive, implicitly orientating the work in direction of the primitive female.
In artwork, the double additionally means copy. The unique is actual and the double is the copy, plagiarism, the counterfeit. That is, in precise reality, how “one” works, over lengthy intervals, with utopia and awkwardness, with obsession and nonchalance, rewriting the lyrics of songs, reproducing each books and watches by hand. Even the materials had been woven on a loom.*1 Then displayed as if in a luxurious boutique, in Plexiglas cupboards (sticky-taped collectively). The materials are organized like sleeves, calling for a hand, buttons. The sleeves detach and turn into a snake. Or they turn into keyboards, as a result of music isn’t very distant.
After all, boutiques for garments and watches exist. They’re modelled by designers, constructed by artisans, promoted in commercials [ . . . ] Right here the whole lot is completed in home as a result of it’s the one approach to each see and have the article because it varieties. “One” obediently mimics gestures with a view to create different states of possession. Herein lies superstition. Alienation as effectively.
The objects which can be current, inside this new psychological realm, are inexact, perhaps even irreverent. Crucial ghosts. The double additionally evokes, throughout the identical household of phrases, diminutive variations of itself: doublure [understudy], a shadowy determine that we by no means actually see or doublon [unnecessary extra] that’s, by nature, superfluous. Doublure [lining] can also be a phrase utilized in stitching, the inside layer that’s not meant to be seen (just like the understudy) however which touches the pores and skin, passing from one physique to a different.
“One” covers pages with varieties that turn into dysmorphic by the ink of a Bic four-color pen. Yet one more doubling, protecting one other protecting. I make issues for a world with no residence.**2
What I’m write to you has no starting: it’s a continuation. From the phrases of this chant, chant which is mine and yours, a halo arises that transcends the phrases, do you’re feeling it? My expertise comes from having already managed to color the halo of issues. The halo is extra vital that the issues and the phrases. The halo is dizzying. I plunge the phrase into the abandoned vacancy: it’s a phrase like a slim monolithic block that provides off a shadow. And it’s a heralding trumpet. The halo is the it***3
Translated by Aodhan Madden
at Crèvecœur, Paris
till July 19, 2025
