Atlas

1 Archives and montage

Two artist’s books, M (2015) and SCREEN (2017), and two websites: A Painting on the Wall (2012), which I meant as a medium close to an exhibition display, and this site, modelled on Duchamp’s Boîte verte.

“Inspired by Duchamp’s La Boîte verte (1934) and conceived as a dynamic and interface-driven book, it traces, retraces and contextualises a singular body of work…”

— Chronology

“Images, words and references can be rearranged into changing connections, extending the archive into a form that can be handled and recomposed.”

— Chronology

external — Aby Warburg (1927–29) kept revising his groupings, so that the same image came back on other occasions. This site is a montage of the same kind: a work returns, and I ask what its new neighbours change, rather than give it a historical ancestor.

external — Hal Foster (2004) describes a constructive archive that proposes relations among displaced materials. Here the connection has to stay readable, and each piece keeps its own history.

Plate 8, recomposed. found — “…an associative system…” (Chronology)

Plate 7, box, shoebox museum. inferred — two boxes that make a collection portable, Duchamp’s, which inspired this site, and a home-made shoebox museum; scale and contents differ: “…Inspired by Duchamp’s La Boîte verte (1934)…” (Chronology); “…home-made ‘shoebox museum’” (Lassnig, LUMA Arles)

2 Naming and signatures

AHFR splits my first name and surname into four syllables, Art Hur Fou Ray, and gives each one a colour value. In Barcode Signature ID my signature, vectorised, reads as a fluid barcode; it takes the place of the eyes on a face made to display sunglasses.

“Décomposition des quatre syllabes de mon prénom et de mon nom de famille.”

— M

“As a signature, it embodies a paradox: simultaneously the mark of an artistic act and an impersonal symbol obscuring individual identity.”

— rt4a Index

external — For Donna Haraway (1988) all vision is partial, and knowledge answers for the place it is seen from. A signature tells you where a work comes from. It says little about the hands and institutions it passes through afterwards.

Plate 3, ART#AAA. found — “Art Hur Fou Ray m ART#AAA mm HUR FFF FOU#000 RAY FFF…” (Art Hur Fou Ray)

Plate 6, cartels. found — “J’utilise cette forme pour mes cartels, ma carte de visite, et mon site web…” (M)

3 Chromatic codes

#aaafff is a web colour code that holds my initials, A and F; on canvas it is a shade between sky blue and purple. #000fff is chroma-key blue, which I use for wall paintings in the proportions of historical film formats.

“The aaafff paintings begin: a colour mixed by eye from a screen, out of neon pink, cobalt blue and titanium white, painted on blackout fabric stretched over or wrapped round a found object.”

— Chronology

external — Nelson Goodman (1968) separates denotation from exemplification: a sample refers to some of the properties it actually has, as a swatch refers to its colour. The hex code names a colour; each painted surface is a sample of it, and never quite the same one.

Plate 5, #aaafff. found — “…pairs the series name, #aaafff, with the designation of the hidden object…” (#aaafff)

Plate 11, #000fff. found — “…begin the 000fff series…” (Chronology)

4 Constructing a beginning

before ARTS gathers my drawings from 1993, research comics from 2007 and sculptures from 2010. Cartes-cartels (2023) is a document of labels I made for the works of 2012.

“The catalogue gives materials and dimensions to an early body of sculpture, painting and installation and returns it to the present as an archival form.”

— Chronology

external — Drawings from 1993, comics from 2007, sculptures from 2010: I dated and described them years after making them. Jacques Derrida (1995) writes that the way an archive records also shapes what it keeps. The later labels make these early works available; they do not fill in what was never written down.

Plate 1, archival form. found — “…an archival form…” (Chronology)

5 Concealment and visibility

Each #aaafff painting is stretched over an object or wrapped round it, and the title names what the colour hides: an ashtray in Cendrier, an ostrich-feather duster in autruche.

“The title of each artwork pairs the series name, #aaafff, with the designation of the hidden object.”

— #aaafff

external — Édouard Glissant (1990) claims a right to opacity: no one has to be made transparent in order to be in relation. His claim is about people and cultures. A hidden object is a much smaller case, and I keep it as a comparison.

external — The Warburg Institute restricts access to Warburg’s images of Pueblo ceremonies, at the request of the communities concerned. There the right to withhold an image belongs to living people; in my paintings it is only my decision.

Plate 9, monochrome. found — “Like the #aaafff, the canvas-objects are all monochrome…” (Spectre)

6 Labels and classification

In Playing Labels (Cartels à Jouer) (2012) each card is the label of a work, with notes on how to show it. The rule of the deck is that tournaments of labels be held regularly.

“Playing Labels (Cartels à Jouer), a deck of 37 cards whose title plays on cartes à jouer (playing cards) and cartels (wall labels).”

— Chronology

“Labels and wall texts became part of the research.”

— Pre-Natal

external — Gérard Genette (1987) calls titles, prefaces and other thresholds paratexts, the edges that guide how a book is read. When the label is the thing on show, it no longer stands at the edge.

Plate 4, Cartes-cartels. found — “Cartes-cartels, forty pages of museum-style labels I made in 2023 for my works of 2012.” (Chronology)

7 Mobilising the museum

P+ I proposes a train arranged as a white cube, and a contemporary art museum in a refurbished cruise ship. For Caravan (Aargauer Kunsthaus, 2017), cotton curtains painted bright red covered the glass façade.

“…tucked it into his home-made ‘shoebox museum’”

— Lassnig, LUMA Arles

“A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.”

— Beware of Curator (music)

external — Robert Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement’ (Artforum, 1972): the essay that AI voices read in my rt4a release Beware of Curator (2022).

Plate 13, night train. inferred — a museum train I proposed, and a documented journey by night train between encounters: “A train, arranged as a white cube…” (P+ I); “…travelling by night train…” (Glissant, LUMA Arles)

8 Associative compositions

P+ sets out prospects as cards; its collections on the site serve as templates for real playing cards. A prospect can become a work, a series of works, a presentation, a representation, a utopia or a dystopia.

“P+ is a game of associations, a corpus of possibilities in which prospects and projects can form storyboards, narratives, scripts, events and exhibitions.”

— P+

“In two words: Oblique Strategies, the cards of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.”

— P+

“I developed P+ as an associative system of physical and digital cards.”

— Chronology

external — Hal Foster (2004) makes connection a task, not a guarantee. Two cards side by side make a possible project; it becomes a documented relation only when another source supports it.

external — Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt (1975): their Oblique Strategies is the point of reference I gave P+.

Plate 13, utopia. inferred — the P+ prospects can end in a utopia or a dystopia; the Glissant book I co-edited answers in its title that utopia is necessary: “…a utopia or a dystopia.” (P+); Édouard Glissant, Dans un monde imprévisible, l’utopie est nécessaire (Biography)

9 Painting as support

The Lauren paintings are made on bed bases, the Kasimir paintings on pillows, in acrylic on cotton duck. The Spectre text dates the start of the series to 2013.

“Initiated in 2013, it commenced when Fouray stretched canvas over his bed’s box spring.”

— Spectre

“The ‘object-paintings’ series features Andy and Kasimir as its focal points.”

— Spectre

external — John Roberts (2010) places artistic technique inside the social division of labour. A bed base saves me the stretcher; it does not save me the painting.

10 Images in circulation

At DOC! in 2018, Pierre Joseph’s exhibition was built with and around the potato, from the hashtag ‘#potato’ to the starch in film and in the glue that held the photographs to the wall.

“One only needs to search for the hashtags ‘#potato’, ‘#potatoes’ (and all their variants, including in Esperanto)”

— Pierre Joseph, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

“From the starch that fixes the image on film to the starch glue binding the forty-five ‘endless photographs’ to the DOC wall.”

— Pierre Joseph, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

“Also a pleased victim of ‘Aura’s migration’”

— Pierre Joseph, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

external — Hito Steyerl (2009) defends the poor image, a copy worn by compression and valued for how far it travels. At DOC! the hashtag is one way of sorting the images; the starch and the wall are other material stages of their circulation.

external — The same potatoes exist as search results and as forty-five ‘endless photographs’ on the DOC! wall. Claire Bishop (2024) describes an attention split between the work in the room and its documentation on a screen. A search and a visit give two kinds of access to the same images, and neither replaces the other.

Plate 6, keywords and labels. found — “He hijacks the keywords and labels…” (Pierre Joseph, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles)

Plate 11, green screen. inferred — a green screen and a blue incrustation surface are both colours keyed for an image; whether the two works share a technique remains a question: “…the perfect green screen…” (Pierre Joseph, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles); “…blue incrustation wall paintings…” (Chronology)

11 Projection and repetition

Polyvision is Abel Gance’s three-screen process for Napoléon (1927), and #000fff (polyvision) takes its name from it. The Morel works take theirs from Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel.

“This piece, a mural bearing the intense hue of #aaafff, does not conceal but rather implies an object’s projection.”

— Spectre

“The painting made for it, 000fff (Polyvision) (Spectre), takes its name from Abel Gance’s three-screen process for Napoléon (1927)”

— Chronology

“Morel is a fictional character who invented a machine that records the actions of human beings and loops them, reproducing reality.”

— SCREEN

external — The #000fff paintings are blue screens waiting for a projection, and Morel takes its name from a machine that records people and plays them back for ever. Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine (2000) shows images that machines make for other machines, to guide an operation. Morel’s recording does nothing of the kind: it keeps an appearance going, and that is all it does.

external — Giorgio Agamben (2000) defines gesture as the display of a means as such, an action shown with no end beyond itself. Repeated, a gesture becomes available again, and the repetition also shows how far it now is from the moment it was made.

Plate 7, The Invention of Morel. inferred — compare two uses of Morel’s fictional recording; no direct relation between works is stated: “This concept, ‘The Invention of Morel’” (SCREEN); “An island, replicating the epiphany from ‘The Invention of Morel’…” (P+ I)

Plate 14, curtain. found — “…with the curtain as the projection surface.” (SCREEN)

12 Myth and transformation

Monsters is a list of mythological creatures: Lamassu, Hafgufa, Djinn, Fei Lian, Melusine. We Are the Extraterrestrials is a string of questions about everyday life in space.

“Fei Lian, Nymph, Pazuzu, Yakshi, Melusine…”

— Monsters (music)

“Isn’t it nice to hear the planets?”

— We Are the Extraterrestrials (music)

“Isn’t it nice to visit some secret asteroid?”

— We Are the Extraterrestrials (music)

external — Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel is a formula of gesture and emotion that survives from antiquity into later images. A list of names can start that kind of comparison; on its own it shows no survival.

Plate 7, spaceship. inferred — a song asks whether it would be nice to live in a spaceship; P+ would put a museum on a cruise ship: “Isn’t it nice to live in a spaceship?” (We Are the Extraterrestrials (music)); “…a refurbished cruise ship.” (P+ I)

13 The exhibition as archive

With Hans Ulrich Obrist I co-organised at LUMA Arles a series of exhibitions built from his archives: Édouard Glissant (2021), Etel Adnan (2022), Agnès Varda (2023). I have also organised exhibitions of other artists at DOC! and Silicon Malley.

“…featuring a series of chain reactions involving ordinary objects set in motion where one thing leads to another…”

— Glissant, LUMA Arles

“…travelling by night train, each encounter leading to another, each artist sending him to others…”

— Glissant, LUMA Arles

external — In Hal Foster (2004), archival artists propose connections and leave them provisional. An exhibition makes one path through the documents; it does not stand in for the archive.

external — Claire Bishop (2024): Bishop treats research-based art as a negotiation of abundant information. Sampling and sustained reading give different access to a collection; its extent cannot be equated with what one visitor absorbs.

14 Display and museography

In SCREEN I set out to learn how paintings were hung before picture rails, and the question stays open. Display comes back in On Italian Museography (Silicon Malley, 2018), which kept to a single site: BBPR’s Castello Sforzesco.

“For six months I wanted to discover a new arrangement: how were paintings hung, historically, before picture rails?”

— SCREEN

“That question remains unanswered.”

— SCREEN

external — Jacques Rancière (2000) calls the distribution of the sensible the order that decides who can see and who can speak. Moving a painting off the rail changes what a visitor sees. It does not, by itself, change who gets to look.

15 Knowledge and futures

Foundation (2022) sets the Apple TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation beside the private art foundations of the twenty-first century, and asks whether they help and support the present or shape the future.

“…to move a scientific elite to a remote planet to save a galaxy from barbarism…”

— Foundation

“Ecology, inclusion, technology: are these shared pursuits not strategies to preserve the Earth’s species, as psychohistory…”

— Foundation

external — For Donna Haraway (1988) knowledge is always situated: someone holds it, from somewhere, and answers for it. An archive for the future depends on who keeps it and who may open it, as much as on what it stores.

Plate 7, ship. inferred — two ways of taking culture away from where it was made: a museum aboard a cruise ship, and an elite sent to a remote planet: “…a refurbished cruise ship.” (P+ I); “…a remote planet…” (Foundation)

Plate 12, planets. inferred — a remote planet as the place where knowledge is kept safe, and planets you could listen to: “…a remote planet…” (Foundation); “Isn’t it nice to hear the planets?” (We Are the Extraterrestrials (music))

16 Images across media

Four of my paintings return as the images of rt4a releases: Beware of Curator, Accelerate, This Is Not a Tender World and Chiquito. In the Beware of Curator release, AI voices read Robert Smithson’s ‘Cultural Confinement’.

“The song takes elements from the theme of The Matrix and sets them over beats inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ (1998).”

— Chiquito

external — For Hito Steyerl (2009) distribution is part of what an image is. A painting that becomes a cover reaches other people through other channels; the painting and the song remain two works.

Plate 19, a + o –. inferred — a + o –, the practice I shared with NCM from 2013 to 2015, is carried in the bracket of a song title: “Ecco Beach (a + o –) rt4a…” (Ecco Beach (a + o –) (music))

17 Typography and appropriation

Borrowed signs and typefaces: the Marvel logo in Museum, the ‘Beware of Dog’ sign in Beware of Curator, Helvetica in Conservatism kills, Univers 85 after Rémy Zaugg in Dunno, the IKEA logo in IDEA, Croissant in This Is Not A Tender World. Duty takes its title from an Apple Music requirement for artists’ profile pictures.

“Museum (Fraser Official Welcome) puts the word ‘Museum’ in the Marvel logo; Beware of Curator takes the form of a warning sign.”

— Chronology

external — Andrea Fraser (2005) places the institution in the practices through which art is recognised and valued. When I borrow a voice, it can expose those practices, but the work cannot step outside them.

Plate 16, Beware of Curator. found — “Beware of Curator is also paired with a sound work released in 2022, the single Beware of Curator – Smithson Cultural Confinement.” (Chronology)

18 Communication and distance

CALL began with songs that spelt the word ‘call’ and grew to a playlist of eighty-four. In DEMANDS & SUPPLIES (Silicon Malley, 2020), Matthieu Laurette’s bills and debts could be paid for by collectors.

“A word for telecommunication becomes, in these songs and their titles, the many forms of love.”

— CALL

“Cultivating mystery, Metzger used red telephone boxes as his means of communication.”

— Metzger, LUMA Arles

external — Aby Warburg (1929) named Denkraum the space for thought a person keeps between himself and the world. Next to CALL, it makes me ask whether a call keeps that distance or closes it. The comparison is mine; the shared word is not evidence of influence.

Plate 16, CALL. found — “Call began with a personal Apple Music playlist.” (CALL)

19 Language and objects

Feast and Hope belong to a series of plates and bowls made in Granada in 2022 and fired a second time in Arles, under a glaze that covered the carved lettering. Welcome to the Art World (2023), a pencil drawing on canvas, depicts a ceramic by Alfredo Aceto (2014) that I never received.

“I had the idea of painting it myself: in a way, to possess it.”

— Welcome to the Art World

external — Jacques Rancière (2000) asks how seeing and speaking are shared out among people. An inscription makes an object readable; its support, its use and its owner still decide who encounters it, and on what terms.

Plate 1, Alfredo Aceto. found — he long promised me one of his ceramics and never gave it, so I painted it myself; Greffes thanks him too: “…Alfredo Aceto had long promised to exchange or give me one of his ceramics…” (Welcome to the Art World); “Special thanks to Alfredo Aceto…” (Greffes)

20 Study and transmission

In 2015 I showed in Life is a Bed of Roses, (un roman), a group show curated by Stéphanie Moisdon at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris. The same year I took my Master in Fine Arts (HES-SO), with #aaafff (STUDIO MODERNES) among the works.

external — For Irit Rogoff (2008) education is a turn in what people can think and do together. These two entries mark moments of study; they do not draw a line of descent.

external — Stéphanie Moisdon curated Life is a Bed of Roses, (un roman). Her book with Les presses du réel gathers criticism, interviews and exhibition texts. It belongs on this plate for that one credit, and I keep it to that.

Plate 5, #aaafff. inferred — in 2013 I entered Stéphanie Moisdon’s programme and began the aaafff paintings; the Chronology sets them side by side and leaves you to weigh what one owes the other: “…in the programme directed by Stéphanie Moisdon.” (Chronology); “I began the aaafff paintings…” (Chronology)

21 Instructions and scores

P+ I sets one rule: no finished object or work, only drafts of ideas mixed together. P+ has nine decks: P+ N, from 2012, then P+ I to P+ VIII, from 2024 to 2026.

“It is a toolbox, a database stemming from a theoretical strategy first meant for teaching: to sketch 100 projects a week.”

— P+

“Never produce a finished object or work; only write and imagine drafts of ideas, mixing them together.”

— P+ I

external — Sol LeWitt (1967) wrote that in conceptual art all the planning and decisions are made beforehand, and the execution is a perfunctory affair. P+ keeps the planning and leaves out the execution: the cards stay open to the next combination.

external — e-flux keeps an archive of unrealised projects as material in their own right. I take it as a comparison for how a project lives on; it gives me no rule for deciding which cards are works.

22 Institutions and their voices

Museum asks whether contemporary museums are collections of superheroes, or of their stories. In Beware of Curator the curator, in today’s sense of the word, has become the guardian of cultural heritage, as the dog guards the house.

“When Museum replaces the Marvel logo…”

— Museum (Fraser Official Welcome)

external — Andrea Fraser (2005) counts the critic as part of the institution: whoever criticises it also has a stake in it. That includes me, painting these signs from inside the field they address.

external — Robert Smithson (1972): Beware of Curator names his essay ‘Cultural Confinement’ as its reference. Setting it beside Museum is my arrangement for this plate.

23 Contracts and circulation

Matthieu Laurette’s two-line contracts make his expenses available to acquire. DEMANDS & SUPPLIES (Silicon Malley, 2020) was conceived as a retrospective, picking up from his 2012 exhibition at Gaudel de Stampa, Paris. It also ran as an online shop.

“Matthieu Laurette is proposing since 2012, through a commercial arrangement, simple two-line contracts that allow his expenses to be acquired.”

— DEMANDS & SUPPLIES

“It presents a full financial disclosure of all costs and expenses incurred in the past eight years of Matthieu Laurette’s practice as an artist.”

— DEMANDS & SUPPLIES

external — The agreement of Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky (1971) keeps some of the artist’s rights in force after a sale. Laurette’s contract does something else; set side by side, the two show what a contract can hand over and what it holds back.

external — Laurette discloses all his costs and expenses of the past eight years. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (1990) read conceptual art as an aesthetic of administration, and Siegelaub disputed his account. The form of a contract does not tell me whether a work reproduces an institution, redirects it or criticises it.

24 Artistic labour and maintenance

Greffes was a group show at the Villa Medici, Rome, from 16 to 23 November 2017. Christophe de Rohan Chabot and I showed two boxes covered in #aaafff canvas, each referring to the other as its twin. Tournures (DOC!, 2018) brought together Grichka Commaret and Kim Farkas.

“…a collaborative artistic and curatorial practice with Nastassia Cougoulat Montel…”

— Chronology

external — The 1969 manifesto of Mierle Laderman Ukeles made maintenance, the daily work of keeping people and things going, into art. A photograph of an installation shows the work and leaves out the work of keeping it up.

external — For John Roberts (2010) losing a skill and learning a new one are social processes. A decision of mine still relies on other people’s work.

external — The e-flux journal issue of Elena Vogman and Matteo Pasquinelli asks how art operates through labour, cooperation and automation, beyond the objects that represent it. It is a current question, and I leave it open.