There is a substantial difference, though not a difference of field, between a sculpture obtained by taking an object from reality, moving it away from its context of use in order to place it within a supra-real, symbolic-aesthetic dimension, such as the bottle rack; and one obtained through the juxtaposition of two objects, for example by placing a bicycle wheel on a stool. Different again is the making of the sculpture of a Fountain, by overturning a urinal and forcibly changing the sign of things. Let us proceed in order: the bottle rack is a pure Ready-Made, it reveals the character of an “operation”: taking common objects and changing their context, removing them from their functional use, placing them within a different semiotic-aesthetic field. Context, precisely, does all the work. With a pedestal, a plaque, a title, and within a place of art, we have a sculpture, or what I see as such. In the bicycle wheel on the stool, the assemblage of objects reveals their possibilities and capacities: moving while remaining still, a thought of fixity and internal dynamism. This means that all objects potentially possess qualities that can be diverted, shifted, guided through juxtaposition. This is the true parent of Found Footage, of this idea that elements, objects as much as images, can change sign through their juxtaposition, as in the relation with the “before” and “after” of their encounter. The center of the work lies in revealing the sensitive data of which objects are composed: lines and movement, lightness and heaviness. In this case one even opens toward the kinetic capacities of the object displayed in the exhibition. Movement enters the sculptural field and vision benefits from it, conceiving it as part of the composition.
The context of everything, that which generates the meaning of the sign, is the exhibition space. The object becomes something else through repositioning and, by osmosis, through the simple gesture of the author. Of context, the operation is a participating field; it does not truly contest it, in the sense that it does not contest the sacredness of the exhibition context, but rather the opposite: it is the emptiness of the context that is filled by the profane object, which through this operation becomes sacred. We are by now outside the church and the academy, the old fields entrusted with investing the artistic object with sacredness, and we have, ultimately, a return of unused aura. This excess, which is the work orphaned of authority, is sacralized precisely by a new context: that of the market and exhibition. At the same time the revolt/contest contributes to sacralizing the place in which the object is displayed. If this place can in fact be contested and desacralized, it means that it was already sacralized. The bottle rack pushes the issue deeply, an issue common to all new art, and particularly to the Ready-Made. It is a sculptural object and not a design object, and thanks to the gesture of the eye, which now reads the new authorial context, it is an object that moves within consciousness. We are contesting the art space, incapable of generating new art, while simultaneously recognizing its role. Consciousness works to analyze the very meaning of the displacement from use to exhibition. It is a sculptural object and not a design object because design solves a problem, with grace, with elegance, but in adherence to everyday life. Sculpture is simply a sacred object. It is therefore by now the sculpture of a bottle rack. In a certain sense the parrot or the horses of Jannis Kounellis are the same operation. They seem to declare that I cannot surpass life and therefore move it elsewhere. In the case of Kounellis one also declares that life already lives. Whether I want it to or not. The journey is to have new eyes, said Marcel Proust.
Let us return to the point: this sacralized and desacralized space at the same time, which is the exhibition space, becomes occupied by its mystifier: the art object that is not an artifact. It is the very operation of rebellion that renders the containing space invested with the capacity to bestow value. The gesture of opposition reveals the context, and the context is promoted into an adequate and sufficient context. The eye will perceive it as sculpture because of this context, and because of the pedestal. There are no true shifts of sign. A bottle rack that no longer drains bottles and that stands on a pedestal must necessarily be the sculpture of a bottle rack.
The third assisted Ready-Made, Fountain, poses an additional problem. It is not an assembled object, nor does it have its center in sculptural aesthetics, or at least not in sculptural or kinetic research. Nor does it merely stop at the function of use that is removed and reconceived. It is instead an operation of conceptual character. Something that perhaps only Olympia had previously been, although differently. To put it briefly, there is here a mental labor necessary for comprehension. The overturned object, recontextualized, renamed, re-signed, acquires new characteristics, not latent in the object, indeed entirely absent, acquired for the first time thanks to the gesture, the title, and the act of overturning, which shifts it toward a new form: complete recontextualization. Now our eyes have been forced, not accompanied, compelled to see the fountain, indeed the sculpture of the fountain, because we have been told so. What has been declared must necessarily be. Not only the ironic sense of the spout, but also the sculptural sense, bestowed by the place and the name. We discover that sculpture is completely within the observer and that it is to the observer one must look more than to the object. One can speak to him, one can direct him. We discover the referential-communicative value of art. Art, this magmatic value that proceeds, after its eruption downward like lava, incorporating new minerals. A ghostly study group, itself mobile in time, attempts to decide whether the newly opened fields are themselves art, whether the value of definition, which each time is renegotiated, should be expanded. And thus the new candidate enters once and for all. Something that “signifies” instead of representing becomes capable of being exhibited. The displacement of meaning within the sign. The value of openness and contractuality in signification.
