 |
In the Kingdom of Charlie Brown |
|
| François Curlet exhibits at the Centre d’Art santa Mònica. Mixing reality and fiction, François Curlet brings back the nonconformist, burlesque and absurd tradition of Dadaism, a necessary reference of critical thinking. |
|
DAVID G. TORRES
Maybe because convulsed times (and, without a doubt, this is starting to be one) reactivate convulsed ideas, recently there are increasing occasions on which the formation of Dadaism in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich reappears to me as a necessary scenery about which to think.
First, because of the political weight that the formation of Dada involved. In 1916, the flight from the war to a neutral setting, Zurich, and the coming together of a group of artists and poets became an act of generalised rejection and condemnation towards society and the values that had provoked the confrontation. If they seemed to be clairvoyants in any way, and something seemed to unite this group of people who planned soirées in which they attacked everything attackable or simply, explored what was ridiculous as an artistic, political and pertinent vital option – something we will get to later on – it is the ability to run on hearing the first shot. And this is as much as being clear about who the enemies are, and where the lines are drawn. It is not that easy, as soon as concepts linked to patriotic feelings (of whatever colour or size) ooze out, oh, oh, oh, the ability to be critical weakens. Dada is a reference of critical thought to propose to oneself to dismantle, attack and make fun of the entire value system of western society, by being one of the few ones to smell the national stench hidden behind the bullets, to see the complicity of ones and of others in an oppressive social set up. It is there where the lines are drawn, the bands, that are no longer conventionally political or national because for true critical thought there is no appreciable difference between one and the other and yet there is, however, against all of them.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| François Curlet. Charlie Brown Flag, 2005 |
|
|
|
|
|
| Dada is a reference to the need for critical thinking. |
|
|
Therefore, point one, Dada appeared as a reference of critical thought, and of the need to exercise it in a time in which the shadow of totalitarian ideologies reappeared. The limitation of the Dada lines should show us which is the responsibility of the intellectual and of the artist, and reveal the silent complicities of culture.
And in second place (and this is what I would like to develop here), the Cabaret Voltaire is a suitable setting in which to think about a formal question, which will set the bases of this critical thought.
Hugo Ball  (militant pacifist, who fled to Zurich, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire with Emmy Hennings and main driving force, with Tristan Tzara, of Dada) is the star of one of the most reproduced photos of the beginnings of the Cabaret Voltaire. In it, he appears attired in a strange rigid cape that barely allows him to get his hands out, which are covered in gloves like paws, his body is stuffed into a three quarter length tube and on his head he is also wearing a long tube as a hat. He is in front of two lecterns ready to read the poem "Karawane" to a very limited public, in the small redoubt that was Cabaret Voltaire, with few witnesses, and which over time has become a kind of mythical setting.
|
|
|
For eyes that are anchored to conventionalism and settled on common sense, obviously Hugo Ball’s fancy dress and recital ("... / hollaka, hollala / anlogo bung / blago bung / bosso fataka / ü üü ü / ...") belonged straight in the category of the ridiculous. Ridiculous or absurd (its consideration in one sense or another would possibly be equal to standing one side or the other of the line), in any case the strategy was clear: to destroy everything, to start from scratch; to situate oneself in a counter logic, against reality interpreted as flat, against the prose of what is real about which the symbolist poets spoke, his fancy dress interrupts like a kind of discontinuity, not very serious, far removed from common sense. And it is precisely here that I would like to stop briefly and go over to Pierre Bourdieu in Las reglas del arte when he talks about behaviour that is also far removed from common sense, such as that of Don Quixote.
For the French sociologist, Don Quixote’s behaviour is typical of the state of adolescence. Don Quixote is, in fact, an adult whose behaviour maintains childish features: he also dresses up, but, above all he confuses reality and fiction, for example, where there are windmills he sees giants. The position I have expressed on various occasions is that this state of adolescence is a primordial condition for the development of critical thought. What Don Quixote does isconstantly interpret reality. In some way, from the moment he is willing |
|
| not to believe that a windmill is necessarily a windmill, reality splits and interpretation comes into play. Don Quixote’s adolescent state, like Hugo Ball’s attitude, illustrate the meaning of critical thought for which reality is not flat, but that it needs to be constantly put into question, extending the doubt to the very nature of the objects. |
|
The right distance
How to take on the relationship between reality and fiction and the need to interpret was the crux of La Distancia Correcta by Mabel Palacín, a double video projection shown at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in October 2003. A character who lives in a kind of basement with a huge cinema screen on which fragments of film appear and with which the character tries to relate, interpret, reconstruct some logic of meaning are projected on two screens on which the images intermingle. He interferes in actions that are far removed from him, that only exist in the fiction of a screen, like a kind of updated Don Quixote, he confuses reality and fiction. Finally, what the attempts at influencing, interpreting or doing without the images that surround this individual closed in a basementaim to mean is, precisely; the right distance between the inability to read images and to interpret the world beyond its mere superficiality and the absolute madness that is involved in losing oneself in them.
|
|
| Charlie Brown, on the dole, sells peanuts in the underground. |
|
|
If Mabel Palacín aimed to show how our way of life is constructed, not just through our relationship with what is real, but also through our relationship with fiction and with how we are able to find the correct distance for interpreting both of them. François Curlet has proposed disrupting the limits between reality and fiction. In some way, François Curlet goes back to the position of Hugo Ball dressed up as who really knows what. Like an interruption of fiction in the full face of reality.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| Mabel Palacín.La distancia correcta, 2003 |
|
|
|
|
|
Peanuts
François Curlet has taken Charlie Brown, the famous star of the comic strip, as a kind of alter ego. In 2000, when “Peanuts” stopped being published in the magazine in which it was periodically published, he decided to seek a solution to the new problem of Charlie Brown and get him off the dole. In view of his professional experience, he prepared him a small cardboard cart for selling peanuts in the Paris underground as many people do in fact habitually do.This slightly malicious joke had a kind of whiplash effect, there and back, of considering Charlie Brown to be a real character and finding him the most suitable job for his skills, to present this sales cart in the context of an exhibition, in which we go back to the fiction terrain. And it is just here, in the fiction terrain, in that of art and culture, |
| that Charlie Brown, a character on the dole who sells peanuts in the street, on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder, reappears as Charlie Brown, the alter ego of the artist, as an example of the treatment received and of the place that art and culture occupy and what is taken care of in art and culture.
It does not seem to be chance that it is precisely Charlie Brown, an almost adolescent child, that is the character chosen by François Curlet as the object of some of his works, an artist who is bringing back the irreverent and questioning tradition of all the social conventionalism of Dadaism. Probably, those for whom Hugo Ball’s fancy dress corresponded to the category of ridiculous, will also slot into the same category the making of a flag out of wool with the zigzag motive of Charlie’s Brown’s jersey(Charlie Brown flag). However, it has a lot more to do with the absurd, not that of Charlie Brown, but that of the flags.
So, point two, the pertinence of Dadaism reappears with regard to the need to foster critical people, with how this ability is related to seeing beyond a fancy dress and the need to believe that windmills are not always windmills. If Hugo Ball’s fancy dress leads to unmasking all the other fancy dresses, if it is an arm thrown through what is absurd, such as the logical way for ending with everything that is absurd; it would now be ridiculous to ask oneself if Charlie Brown’s flag is the absurd one.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
François Curlet. Charlie Brown, 2000
|
|
|
|
His diary about the Cabaret Voltaire (Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary) has recently been published in Spanish: Hugo Ball, La huida del tiempo (un diario), Ed. El Acantilado,
|
| |
|
|
