Everything is reduced, through ignorance or through the refusal to make sense, to the fact that it seems sufficient now to display a pencil, a pen, an eraser, a trowel, a few reams of paper or a bag of cement, so that the intention of using it – without saying why or even in pretending to say why – on the part of any somewhat ‘narcissistic’ ignoramus, allowing him to claim with force, pride and seemingly valid reasons, that he belongs to the history of art - I don’t say modern art, but as all the people who today deny all sense of history, contemporary art.

Does Antoine de Bary, who seems to consider his own existence as a means of autonomous individual expression, and whose work as ‘artmaker’ consists of fighting against the flight of time and the limits of individual space, belong to that category of individuals who are more or less consciously nihilistic?
I don’t think so. On the contrary : in each one of his annual series of everyday collages, the accumulation of which makes you think, in a richer and more surprising way, of the famous series of paintings by On Kawara, he erects votive steles to the struggle against his own demise. All his work participates in a magical operation destined to preserve memory – and not only his own – as if today there was nothing more urgent than to arm oneself against isolation, chaos, and death, in which opinion I find it hard to say he’s mistaken.

Antoine de Bary, who is partisan of a new ‘esthetic of the diverse’ which is renewing on European soil the ideas which Victor Segalen attempted to conceptualise from his travels in the Pacific and in the Far East, treats each of the postcards, the photographs, each one of the leaves of a calendar, each astrological or mythological image, which he integrates into his collages, like fragments of an immense puzzle that has to be reassembled, and which could become mixed up in his mind with a new map of the Universe, as conceived by a new Galileo.
He fights therefore, the elements of the puzzle in his hands, with determination, humour qnd method, against his own inability to think out the psycho-physical totality of the world.

Such an overstated, and therefore exceptional, Utopian undertaking has a certain fraternal appeal for me, as I recognize not only some of my own personal ambitions and personal endeavours at being exceptional and extravagant, but a sort of a symbolic point of reference in the midst of the cacophony of works of art at the heart of a civilization which is tending, in its own technical expansion, its own intellectual entropy, to blow all the old, the contemporary and future value systems to bits.

In order to help him hold fast against all the indifference, phony agreements, and the misunderstandings to which his work as a cataloguer of the accidental and the perpetual reporter on the world may fall prey, I shall permit myself to give him some advice, as a talisman.

Firstly: At a time when value judgments are absurdly confused with acknowledgement of economic success of more or less short duration, one must not only create for oneself an ethic at least as independent as the affirmative irony of Marcel Duchamp –never forgetting the examples of revolutionary individualism which he gave in his refusal of all systematic production --, but try to go beyond this by an conscious absence of all judgment, positive or negative, be it in the face of all that may present itself behind the mask of art, anti-art, or non-art.

Secondly: one must consider one’s own consciousness as an opening of the human being to all the manifestations of existence, a bridge between all the singularities of beings, of social groups, of religions, and of things. Thus providing the greatest ethical coherence on all occasions when the repressive power of social forces of the world economy is let loose, through the reign of disdain and of the arbitrary, against all the manifestations of the rebellious spirit, which contrary to what is believed and prophesied, will not stop multiplying in the twenty years to come throughout the whole world.

Thirdly: continue, as he has been doing, to travel to all sorts of places and to erect on his passage as he goes a gift of a sort of totem pole of memory, especially in China, in Korea, and in Japan, and if possible on the edge of the two poles of the earth, and in all the deserts, to reinforce at each encounter the new network of real relationships between men, their connivances and what they have in common, which I will call, in defiance of international technical supremacism, the Externet network.