Regime iconoclaste d'un frisson: le cercle vicieux après Salo Iconoclastic Regime of the Shudder: the Vicious Circle after Salo

Bernhard Sachs

October 11 - November 6, 2005

Open to the public weekends from Sat 22 October, 2 - 5 pm, or by appointment, 0419381106

Opening/Closing Sunday November 6, 2 - 5 pm.

This project is written in the hieroglyphics of trepidation .

Trepidation characterises the space after Pasolini's Salo:120 Days of Sodom .   This last work of the Marxist heretic, a work of accentuated pessimism, an assertion of a relentless reality principle, collectivity as perversion, as a collectivity of perversions disclosing a regime of disbelief, casts the legacy of the political in the shadow of deSade. The end of the utopic.

Trepidation characterises the space between people, the frisson that contains the inevitable procedure, that premonition of finitude, the end of the utopic.   Jacques Derrida, in a series of lectures following the death of his friend, Paul deMan, presented a very moving speculation on the meanings of the circumstances that structure as a certainty the love between two people that carries the inevitability that one of them only will experience the death of the other, carry the space of mourning and its double articulation - the radical singularity of facing ones own death and the radical singularity of loss.   A radical iconoclasm .

Trepidation characterises the space of representations, the invocation of the vicious circle, the returns of history, the compulsion that reached its self-annihilating denouement in a metal tub at Jonestown -   a drink, a bath, an end.   The end of the Utopic.   There is a curious point of coincidence in the sign that dominated the collective of the end at Jonestown,

            "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

and the sign of the vicious circle as the signature of the logic of the eternal return of the same in Pierre Klossowski's famous account of Nietzsche.

These compulsive returns are a sadism in signification, the hallucinations of politics as a monologue acted on the flesh, a derision in the body as image of the past.   Odeon .   A moment in Paris.   The trepidation is a shudder of recognition.   It begins almost undetectably, a feeling in a street, in the intimacies by which we inhabit the abstractions that inhabit us. These histories. These corrosions. This stench of representation.

Regime iconoclaste d'un frisson: le cercle vicieux après Salo / Iconoclastic Regime of the Shudder: the Vicious Circle after Salo . is the second in a trilogy of events that began with (Reconstruction of) the Polish Game, (Ocular Lab, 2004).   Like Polish Game it is structured as a project in process with no particular resolution.   It is, in effect, one work, an extended drawing through the space of Ocular Lab.   The actual "exhibition" is for four hours at the end the period in the Lab.   The production of the project can be viewed on weekends from Sat 22 October.