Antoine outside the walls

He had just reached the milestone age of thirty-three years of age when he decided to go outside the walls… of his studio.

Was he asking himself about ‘the end of painting’ preached by Elie Faure as early as 1920? Or about the end of painting? In the wake of the immense calling into question that was May 1968 (the real effects of which will have to be properly measured one day), was he asking himself about the usefulness of the artist in society? There were so many walls to break down.

Antoine said goodbye to the gallery, and took his pilgrim’s staff, following on a road which, in its first stage was to take him from the hole of Les Halles to the ‘hole’ of Le Creusot.

If he hadn’t been able to save les Halles –but this was only his first collective adventure, if one excludes his tribulations as a soldier -, perhaps he would be able to help secure a certain heritage.

Le Creusot, a place no less highly symbolical since it was here that our famous ‘industrial society’ was born and for that very reason, chosen as the site of the first French Ecomuseum under the patronage of Georges-Henri Rivière.

Here were moulds that risked ending up as firewood… one had to intervene. Here was a material served up on a plate for anyone ready to take on a bit of sculpture, and as luck would have it, the notion of reappropriation was beginning to be discussed in learned congresses, these pieces of wood could be delivered and offered as gifts to the town, giving them back to its inhabitants and at least saving them from destruction by the sinister power hammer, thus making of them monuments to those who died in work.

The Sculpture Symposium was a beautiful dream. But for Antoine de Bary, this cradle of collective memory had not yet put all its cards on the table.

It was a commission that was to enable him to have a totally different experience.
In 1974, Gérard Thurauer placed at his disposal the cinema entrance in the winter sport resort at La Foux d’Allos (Alpes de Haute-Provence). Here was an entire wall on which Antoine de Bary could give full vent to his passion for collage, a wall where, involuntarily, he was to give back life and meaning to the famous Plato allegory of the cave (what is appearance? what is reality?), a wall in which he could place before the public an asset which the so-called specialists tend to keep too much to themselves.

And a wall was not enough in itself. It was to give birth to a book – where, on the page opposite his images, I was to engage in an identical assembly-game of texts -, and to a wandering exhibition, based on the fifty-four original panels. On then to another wall, a return to Les Halles.

And Antoine de Bary would have wished for other walls to be made, so that his own initiative could spread like wildfire, exactly as I.N.A. for a while had envisaged other commissions of the same kind.

Then came the Breaking Away.
An experience which took five years to mature.

At the start, a simple but far from banal box of filing cards discovered in a flea-market : the identity cards of ‘indigenous personnel’ of the ‘Schneidre’ empire,- as it is called locally…

This set in motion a veritable whirlwind of questions. Here was la belle France, country of refuge, which put her own factories to work in order to deliver arms to her enemies. Here was ‘Civilisation’ which had been always sustained by the movement and mixing of peoples and which, at its very summit, makes of exclusion its moral law and practises deportation in the most merciless way ever seen in its history.

On a more intimate note: ‘strangers on earth’, as the poet says, are not all of us immigrants in our own society, are not all of us led, at some time or other, to break away? Did we always really choose to break away? How can we transcend these breaks, assume their burden while still continuing to live…freely?

Starting from these simple cards, and from one of those unbelievable old Algéco huts, Antoine de Bary rebuilds a universe, so that those who do not wish to see can finally see. An example of a vicious circle, which I cannot prevent myself from citing: you were already aware of The Mandate by Semliène Ousmane, well now it is no longer just a play for the theatre.

Article 1: A residence permit, valid for a variable length of time, in order to obtain a work permit.
Article 2: One must have a work permit in order to be employed.
Article 3: One must be in employment in order to renew one’s residence permit.
Q.E.D.: And of course you must work by the sweat of your brow!

Antoine de Bary does not wish to be on his own in questioning this state of things. He joins up, in particular, with Jean Genet, Tahar ben Jellorin, Serge Moscovice, Abdellatif Laabi to draw up a catalogue.
And he doesn’t hesitate to knock on every door, but particularly on those which will open to him, to launch his exhibition. Among his partners in this enterprise are : the ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Leisure, the RAC Franche Comté, Bourgogne, the CCI, the Maison de la Culture de Chalon-sur-Saône, the CAC in Le Creusot, the CAC in Montbéliard.

Not everything goes smoothly, or without some heated exchanges (notably in Dreux) but Antoine de Bary will attract along his way other initiatives which will come to reinforce his proposal, such as ‘Algerian Women’ by Marc Granger and ‘Contemporary Arab Painters’ sponsored by the Faris gallery, exhibitions which are often accompanied by film-projections and singing by singers of all nationalities.

The question, clearly stated by Serge Muscovici was clear: ‘Why must this evolution of the foreigner take place despite you instead of with you? In the language of Antoine de Bary: ’ Differences can be added up but cannot be subtracted.’ Antoine de Bary was waiting for the follow-on. The chain of solidarity lasted for a time, but only for a time…

What was clear from all this was that there was no such thing as a break-away without risk. Antoine de Bary decided to raise risk to its highest peak by creating "The white Devil with the sun of the last waste ground".

 

 

‘Man, says Nietzsche in Zarathustra, is a rope stretched between what is animal and what is superhuman, a rope over an abyss.’ In giving homage to Michel Brachet, otherwise known as the White Devil, Antoine de Bary is erecting a monument, a giant screen of photomontage, in honour of all the tightrope walkers, funambulists and high-wire acrobats… Has it not been proved that the greatest security is found where there is the greatest risk? And what a life-discipline!

Here once again he gathers people around him, notably Philippe Petit, Gilbert Lascault, Professor Jean-Paul Binet, to nurture his ideas. And he’ll manage to mobilize around his project the Claude-Nicolas Ledoux foundation, la Saline royale d’Arc-et-Senans, the CAC Mâcon, the CAC at Marne-la-Vallée, the DRAC of Burgundy, the DRAC Centre.

Was the message clearly received? Have people learnt to see what society looks like when viewed from above? Let each one of us learn how to control our life better, Antoine de Bary believes he cannot say things more tellingly.

Without retiring into the desert, and after spending such a considerable amount of energy in an effort to convince people without really knowing how successful he would manage to be, he came to a stage where he ran the risk of being totally depressed. So Antoine de Bary withdrew from the struggle. But if he takes up again his personal work, he is also going to plant masts in the four corners of the world.

A chance encounter, like all encounters when they turn out to be happy ones, was his meeting up with Alpha Oumar Komar, a man who, at that time was simply in charge of the Cultural Cooperative in Jamana in Mali (and who has since become its official president).
The Cooperative had already a publishing house, a documentation centre, a gallery; Alpha Oumar Comaré invites him to open a studio.
There was no question of Antoine de Bary imposing on his ‘pupils’ the discipline and models of the Western World – he knows only too well what burdens the School imposed on himself. Here was the concrete opportunity of enabling each one too reappropriate his own culture.
The work and symbolic act which will be the fruit of this is the masts, ‘masts for oases’ which Antoine de Bary will make sprout up in Mali (at Abmako), then in Quebec (at Sainte-Hilaire-de-Dorset), and with which he hopes to cover old Europe: after Molinos in Spain, masts are planned for Germany (Bremen), Poland (Cracow) and in France, (at Ouroux-en-Morvan), at last!

Each of those masts is accompanied by a book – another way of lodging things in the memory – far from ordinary books, rather boxes, workboxes, with instructions for use and especially, specific materials. There is no need to dwell on the obvious cultural significance of these masts. In every case it is a matter of recreating solidarity in a group, today, alas, de-cultured, needless to say, whether it be in the North or in the South, the East or in the West – all bear the imprint of the ravages wrought by so-called ‘Western Civilisation’. They are all erected around a place which is marked symbolically by the simplest and probably the oldest of signs of identification (and thereby of recognition) in any given case. But Antoine de Bary has also higher aims. He refers notably to a specialist in the esoteric doctrines of Islam, Titus Burckhardt. We repeat the key quotation from his work : ‘We can refer here to the image of the different traditional ways being the spokes of a circle which join only at one point: as the spokes get closer to the centre, they get closer to one another; however they never coincide, except at the centre, where they cease to be spokes.’

He could just as easily have quoted Pascal, with his strange definition of God:- who in the process seems to lose his capital G: a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.

Antoine de Bary’s mast summarises this incomprehensible equation : solitary=united, solitariness=fellowship.