blurring versus confondu (Kaprow) >> texte français
As I was reading Suzanne Lacy's acknowledgements at the end of her introduction to the book Mapping the terrain - New genre public art that she edited(1), I found this: (...) Allan’s enthusiasm for and curiosity about the blurred boundary between art and life (...). And now, what always seemed to be a rather clumsy but meaningless title for a french collection of Allan Kaprow's writings(2), (l’art et la vie confondus), appears in a completely new light when compared to its original title: the blurring of art and life (which, by the way, is not credited in the French version.).
Of course, it is a great translation problem, and, as usual in those kind of cases, it asks for some kind of rewriting by the translator. But blurring is not confondu, event if that option could be linguistically arguable. confondu raises an idea of indentity - life and art being alike - but what is blurred here is the limit between the two. However blurred, there is a limit, a fact that the French title erazes.
What seems here to be an unimportant detail in fact covers up something far more important: an issue as how art and life may be thought of. The French title implicitly suggests that the idea of art should prevail, and that Kaprow promotes a claim for life to be a work of art (in a post-duchampian heritage built on an obsessive quest of the French scene for the definition of art).
But in one of the texts in the book, translated as un art qui peut ne pas être de l’art (3), Kaprow clearly stands agains this idea: (...) that anything can be aesthetized, that we have the right to put into art anything it can wrap up. But why should we aesthetize just anything? (...) going on with that kind of process seemed useless.
Instead of that, Kaprow focuses on, for instance, the action of brushing his teeth - without ever considering it as an artwork. But at the same time, it has something to do with art because the very developpements of modernism have lead to the shrinking of art into its life sources. (...) But ordinary life performed as non-art art can load the everyday with a metaphorical power.
So this would be shifting the focus from art to life itself. Art is but a way to come closer to life, never an end in itself. No image will ever come up to the experience of reality.
(1) Suzanne Lacy ed., Mapping the terrain - New genre public art , Bay Press 1995.
(2) Allan Kaprow, l’art et la vie confondus, centre georges pompidou,1996 (ed. Jeff Kelley, trad Jacques Donguy)
(3) un art qui peut ne pas être de l’art, première publication dans Allan Kaprow 1986, Dortmund, Museum an Ostwall
