Frédérique LECERF is a doctor in arts, teaching, researcher and commissioner of exhibition. Artist, video director and performer, she lives and works between Paris and Berneval Le Grand (France). She followed her studies in the School of Fine Arts of Paris (ENSB-A) in the Accademia delle Belli Arti of Venice and in the University Paris VIII Saint-Denis-Vincennes. She was a junior lecturer at the university Paris VIII from 1998 till 2013 and is lecturer of the University of Lorraine since 2005 and in Paris VII since 2017. She intervened in numerous Schools of Fine Arts, but also for business schools like the EDHEC-Lille, in the ICN Nancy and for the Formation-Drouot, also in China in Beijing for the school XDF.CN-Beijing School and in the HIFA to Wuhan-Chine (Institute of the fine arts of Hubei). She taught at the IESA-Paris (School of businesses by the culture and the market of the art) from 2012 till 2015 when she led projects of exhibition and auction with the students of Master’s degree. She organized study days, conferences and colloquiums (Middle school(College) of Bernardin, Pompidou-Metz Center, Museum of the Hunting and the Nature of Paris, University of Wuhan, Shanghai) and was guardian of numerous exhibition (Oh! The beautiful days, Wonderland TV, Broadway, Station Car park To Park, The Cure, The Hunting in the Snark…). She is also at the initiative and a co-founder of the cultural program art and French-Chinese environment « In What Life You World (s)? » (DQVTM). She handled in 2014/2015, of the programming of the performances to the Museum of the Hunting and the Nature in Paris, and of the « European Night of museums » in 2015 and in 2017 in the same place. In this try splendidly illustrated, she leads us at the heart of a course of the very particular gold, in it that he is of an artistic route and curatorial, a historicity strewed with legends and with adventures committing the man to the highest degree, but also with a philosophy adjacent to the value and the intrinsic plasticity of this precious substance. More exactly, Frédérique Lecerf summarizes us his approach by asserting that « any speech on the gold – in particular, when it is some gold which handles art – is so profoundly rooted in the legends which confer on this element of the supernatural powers that it adorned to escape the ordinary forms of the rationality. But is the gold anything else than that made it human civilizations? Which case, It seems vain to hope to demystify an object the gasoline of which its mythology establishes. At the most we can try to collect the scattered elements of such a narrative; For lack of claiming to write a history of the gold (because it would mean writing a world history), gather a number of data which, being of the science or the fiction, define the gold more still than they do not relate to him and establish an essential prerequisite to penetrate more before the question of the presence and into the uses of the gold into contemporary art.
THE REALITY: PLASTIC ONTOLOGY OF A FLOATING WORLD
Nicolas-Xavier FERRAND is an Art historian. He teaches the graduate school of Architecture of the City and the Territories of Marne-la-Vallée (ENSA, France) since 2015, after a passage at the University of Bourgogne and the Paris-East University. Having worked on Piet Mondrian and Takashi Murakami, he wrote a thesis of art history contemporary on « Bertrand Lavier and the relationship to the reality » (2014), which put in perspective history of the relationship with the real in the art through the work of Bertrand Lavier and its references to Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, in the postmodernity and in the nietzchean philosophy. His researches concern the ways of the formalization of the reality through the works of art, and what these formalizations say cultural areas from which they arise. Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand is also an art critic and writes numerous texts on various contemporary artists: Pierre Labat, Earth of the silence, Ed. Interface, on 2017; Passions, Ed. Gallery Duboys, Center of sacred art of Lille, on 2017; Thierry Diers, Wandering of a writing, Ed. Gallery Duboys, on 2015; Thierry Diers, Hollow Men, Ed. Gallery Duboys, on 2015. He is also commissioner of exhibitions: Dig up the links: Bénédicte Lacorre, Sylvain Leal, Mayssat Jaoudat, Gallery B, 2017, Passions, Center of sacred art of Lille, 2017; The Song of Machines: Nicolas Delay and Matthieu Crimersmois, 2016. An important part of his work of commissionership and publishing (« Techno-Myst », Horsd’ works n°37, Ed. Interface) concerns the way the contemporary practices open a new definition of the relationship between real and virtual. He summarize his approach in these terms : “ The notion of the real is without a doubt one of the key-concepts of modern Western thinking. It serves as a master standard of all things, thoughts, actions, for its capacity to tell the essence of existence. However, the notion itself has never really seen its history properly written, or its definition truly clarified. Invented during the 13th century, by scholastic theologian John Duns Scot, the “reality”, first created to talk about the essences of things, then took different faces: the invention of perspective, printing, the Copernican revolution, the works of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant defined a real alternately objective, possible, intrinsic, unknowable. This plastic possibility of the real, that got its confirmation in art and literature as in the significant rise of social sciences through the 19th and 20th centuries, considerably ossified in the second-half of the last century, and the advent of Postmodernity. The defeat of totalizations, the end of “grand narratives” as described by Adorno and Lyotard, let postmodern human beings in great ontological disarray, with a last left tool called efficiency. If honourably designed to prevent from further blindness towards any overlooking thought system, the practice of efficiency nonetheless led to a reduction of the real to a techno-scientific ontology where facts, concrete things and figures reign. However, numerous works, such as Markus Gabriel’s philosophy, Philippe Descola’s anthropology, or David Hockney and Bertrand Lavier’s artworks, refute this unicity of the real and offer much enriched views. This article aims to put a historical perspective on the notion of the real, and to provide, thanks to the newest approaches of the term, an enhanced and an anthropological redefinition of it, whether considering the Western perspective reversal, the revised relationship between fiction and reality; between virtuality and reality, and to call for a multiplication of the voices that could define the real.”
THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE WORD « SELF » – PHENOMENOLOGY OF A FASCINATING CONCEPT
Danielle BOUTET is professor at the University of Quebec (UQAR) at Rimouski and a member of the international center of transdisciplinary studies and researches (CIRET). She is also is music composer and an interdisciplinary artist. Being specialist in interdisciplinary studies and new artistic practices, she has indeed contributed to the development of interdisciplinary arts programs in the United States and Canada, at educational institutions as well as the Canada Council for the Arts. Her research focuses on the phenomenology of artistic experience, the instaurative process in artistic creation and artistic epistemology. A specialist in research-creation, she is increasingly interested in the role of the arts in the human world, particularly their function of increasing awareness and heightening one’s sense of being. The concept (word and meaning integrated) of « self » dates back thousands of years, its origin lost in the Indo-European emergence. The word and its signified have a long, rich and creative relationship. Studying the concept required looking at this relationship, according to a phenomenological approach: observing the workings, the structure, the behaviour of the concept in interaction with what it is supposed to designate. The author that previously published a paper about art and reductionism in Plastir 32, 09/2013, explain to us that doing so, she gradually distinguished a series of characteristics that followed one another in a movement that seemed natural to her, even systemic; in fact, as you will see, there is something almost mathematical, even cybernetic, in the logic of this sequence. Indeed, we can see in the behaviour of the concept, in its use, four major characteristics: reflexivity, subjectivity, augmentability and self-finality. I present them in the order in which they appeared to me. Moreover, Danielle Boutet became interested in the definition of Self-following a proposal that new information technologies might be techniques of self. “In the context of a scholarly symposium on the subject, I was concerned that the creation of an avatar by a networked gamer, for example, could be considered a technique of self, without distinguishing between « identity », « me » and « self »,” she says. The colloquium brought together mainly philosophers, for whom Michel Foucault was the main reference – which may be surprising if one thinks, for example, that psychology, especially archetypal, Jungian and transpersonal psychology, has a much more important relationship to the concept of Self than philosophy and defines it completely differently. Understanding that these two visions of the Self are wholly irreconcilable, I wanted to look for myself. The result is half-serious, half-poetic, half-rigorous, half-aesthetic – yet it is still edifying. Enjoy your reading!
UNCONSCIOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL STAGES OF THE GENESIS OF A CONCEPT AT WOLFGANG PAULI AND CARL GUSTAV JUNG
Bruno TRAVERSI is a doctor of philosophy of the University Paris Ouest Nanterre and graduate of the Aikikai of Tokyo. He is a researcher associated with the laboratory TEC (Techniques and Stakes in the body) at Paris Descartes University and in the SFPA (French Society of Analytical Psychology). He makes also left the group of the young researchers of the CND (National Center of Dance) of Paris Pantin. Among his research areas, the history and the philosophy of the Far eastern practices (aikido, yoga, dances kagura (older Japanese dance of ecstatic chap) and dances contemporary as the buto and the study of the relations between body and unconscious through these physical practices and Wolfgang Pauli’s works (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945) and of Carl Gustav Jung around the « psychophysical problem » (from 1932 till 1958) which propose an interpretation of the traditional far eastern culture. Among his recent publications on the subject: The unconscious body and the Soul of the world according to C.G. Jung and W. Pauli, Ed. L’Harmattan, Paris, Collection philosophic Opening (2016) and, with Alexandre Mercier, Between quantum physics and psychology of the depths – volume 1: The thing, the space and the time, Editions of the Literary set of France (2017) and The back-world or the neutral unconscious, Editions of the Literary set of France (2018). Having published in PLASTIR 42, 06/2016, A tear in space and the birth of the self – C.G. Jung and W. Pauli, he proposes us here a new approach of the neutral unconscious which he summarizes in these terms: « The pioneering work of Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli led to developing the bombs that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Desperate over this outcome, Pauli sought help from the eminent depth psychologist, C. G. Jung. Their long correspondence provides the powerful and unique record of a mature scientist’s inner journey. It also has had a tremendous impact on scientific and psychological thought ever since. Pauli and Jung is a lucid interpretation of Pauli’s ideas and dreams that forcefully validates his belief in the inseparable union of science and spirituality. Far ahead of their time, Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung both knew this union is essential for the future of humanity and the survival of the planet. »