Player : Raymonde Moulin, Le Marché de l’art

Preservation of rarities is according to Raymonde Moulin an indispensable condition for being accepted by the arts market. It is interesting to observe an example of how the awareness of rarity determines perception of the object as well as the arts market.

To avoid the whole symbolic dimension let’s take a material before it acquires a form. Let’s choose the most banal one. Let’s dissociate it from the properties which make it essential for life. Let’s forget that 80% of our bodies consist of this material. Let’s be interested only in its aesthetic properties. Water is the ideal candidate. Let’s imagine water without thirst, water touched by a diamond rarity. Let us rediscover its transparency, its greater or lesser purity, its unique dynamic properties. Its astonishing optical properties, diffraction and refraction which produce reflections and bending of light while creating from the water in its watery state “a non-object” with paradoxical plastic properties which can take the form of all vessels and preserves it only with the help of gravity.

We also reach the conclusion that water does not attract us by itself but by the way it distorts and reflects the world. This is due to its incomplete transparency: we can see it without touching. It is thanks to its reflected light that the first people became aware of their appearance. This is a material which is not only beautiful in itself but by itself. Medium matter or rather media matter which has a completely different quality when we are interested in a metamorphic way in digital information flow which we cannot suspect of excessive transparency or fluidity refined by the environment.

Ultimately, is water not one of the substances which are the rarest in the universe? Its uneven appearance explains our difficulty feeling that we are less lonely in the galaxy. The other component of life is carbon, whose purest form is a diamond. Two transparencies facing each other – crystal transparency with surprising stability, which however can go up in smoke, and the second one, fluid with a unique pliability, which can extinguish fire. Two states of matter, two aesthetic experiments which are admired outside the sales market and whose very existence explains our presence in the universe.

In its plastic dynamics water represents the closest form of modern creation which to a lesser degree is satisfied by an absolute form, frozen for eternity, and to a greater extent by a process of its activity at the moment of contact with an obstacle, an object or a human being. If we continue this metaphor up to our difficulties in thinking of artistic and aesthetic mutations it would appear that digital media are fluid and the traditional ones are durable and static.

The project could take place under zero gravity, where a dynamic sculpture would take the form of a litre of water floating in space, disconnected from the surroundings. It would take a form defined by the limits of molecular cohesion close to splitting apart. The most perfect realization of this project would be a new distribution of hydrogen and oxygen atoms on earth in such a way that this litre of water would be the last and only one.

Cet article a été publié le Mercredi 19 mars 2008 à 12.42 et est classé dans Liminal Art, space art. Vous pouvez en suivre les commentaires par le biais du flux RSS 2.0. Vous pouvez laisser un commentaire, ou faire un trackback depuis votre propre site.