Topor, Morellet, Spoerri: La volonté de distance

Galerie Anne Barrault presents the exhibition “Topor, Morellet, Spoerri: La volonté de distance“. Friendship, wit, humour and common questions link Topor, Morellet and Spoerri. Each of them, in his artistic purpose, has strived, to a large extent, to implement coincidences. The momentum is managing to seize from the passing flow of ideas and visions those to fix (to trap). Fixing the idea by giving it a shape, or fixing the shape and its infinite potential of meaning. Spoerri, Morellet and Topor are opposed to the one and only meaning and use of things, shapes, bodies and significations.

The multiple meaning, the multiple object “multiplication is justice done to the infinite possibilities of transformation” (Spoerri). The fusion of the senses is stimulating. With geometry, confusion conceals high creative potential for formal psycho- activity. Order can then be seen as incidental.
Geometry is a product of mind, which is seen in the creation of every being: minerals, plants, animals. Geometry’s chances, its “noises”, and its accidents generate new shapes, which mingle with firmer and repetitive generations of shapes. Some artists want to impose an a priori order, by trying to hide the chaos of the world. They do not want to see, but they would have us believe they have seen something. Other people, who do not want to see, follow them and support them. They are cowards, who ease their consciences. Other artists recognize chaos and know order is but a fleeting and derisive proposition. They are not afraid of chance, which can be dangerous, but the danger of order as something unchanging is still greater. Order is always relative, subjective, and fickle. It depends on chance. Morellet, Spoerri and Topor are not serious.

This lack of seriousness allows them to maintain a reasonable distance with the tragic brainwashing of so many watchwords we set ourselves,
or which we let ourselves be set. What brings these three artists together in this exhibition is the result, on the one hand, of Spoerri’s heartbeat in “Crocrodrome de Zig et Puce”, a huge work by Tinguely installed in Centre Pompidou. In the belly of the beast created by his friend Tinguely, Spoerri had put up a “musée sentimental”, and “une boutique aberrante”.

Topor and Morellet were there among other artists, all of them Spoerri’s friends. On the other hand, Morellet, Topor and Spoerri have affinities; all three of them are in the tradition of Dada, and before him Alfred Jarry and the incoherent Artists. Last but not least, there are striking contrasts between the formal styles of these three artists. They break our perception and allow us to re-question each of these works in the light of the other. New meanings appear.