Good evening everyone.
The presentation has been made, so I’ll say pretty quickly why I’m here.
I will talk about drawings, provocative drawings,
drawings that can be a little aggressive or come in,
and I’m going to do a comparative
between certain types of drawings and some other types of drawings.
For starters, of course, drawing has become important
since Charlie,
and since the various attacks that took place in Paris and Nice,
which gave rise to important publications on this occasion
people who made drawings spontaneously,
and professionals too,
around these dramatic events.
Drawings that are rather drawings, we will say compassionate,
drawings that bring together somewhat symbolic images
to express their distress, their sadness, their sorrow,
their anger eventually.
These drawings,
we saw them bloom mainly in some newspaper pages,
a lot on TVs, etc.,
because presumably,
the focus had been on the cartoonists,
after Charlie’s attacks, and on this medium that is drawing.
Well, that’s what we will call drawings that are rather nice.
It gets tougher with other types of drawings,
we had another dramatic event that was the drowning of the little Aylan,
who was photographed by a Turkish photographer
on the beaches of Turkey,
and there, the same, big emotion,
and then a lot of drawings that appeared,
which took up the silhouette of the child,
the colors of his t-shirt and his shorts, etc.
And then Charlie Hebdo continued his work,
and there was this drawing by Riss,
which caused a lot of emotion and a lot of revolt.
And so, I will try to explain why nice drawings
are not so well intentioned as that,
or maybe not so useful,
and how “bad” drawings,
like this one, because we are really in a cruel drawing,
can have a positive role to play.
Not necessarily easy to explain.
The first thing to do is go back to what the image is,
taking this first example,
which is a painting you probably know, a painting by Magritte,
which is a little curious, amazing,
since it represents a pipe, very realistic,
with the mention: “It’s not a pipe”.
So what is it ?
Is it a cow, a carrot? No.
This means that a pipe drawing is not a pipe,
it’s a drawing, a painting.
So, this is the first thing to understand.
Then I pass you some small drawings
that pose a little bit of the problem that I dealt with
around the representation,
among others, with the problem of the cartoons of Muhammad.
A small problem between an image, its interpretation and its representation.
There is a misunderstanding in the image,
at the drawing level, at the level of these things.
We will go a little bit in the history of art and history of images,
through different paintings,
and see how, these pictures, these paintings
have gone to rub themselves a little on taboos,
and on apparent consensus.
We start with this painting by Matisse, who is a woman.
Tawny current, early 20th century.
He was caught by the proponents of classical painting,
saying that his character was horrible.
And he said, “Yes, that’s normal,
if I met these women in the street, I would run away at full speed.
They are not women, they are painting. Same subject.
So, we must go back to the origin of the expression of the man,
and we realize that drawing in the world of rock painting,
of parietal art, etc., as here in Lascaux,
we wonder why the man began to draw.
We made several assumptions,
we wondered if they were training scenes for the hunt,
educational figurations, etc.
In my opinion, it was a way for the man to apprehend his universe.
In a world that was incomprehensible, in a steady stream of actions
with animals we do not know where they come from, where they go, etc.,
it’s a way of appropriating the real, to understand the real
and to give a reading of reality.
There is this phrase of Shakespeare’s Macbeth,
I’ll let you read it.
The most interesting part.
He says: “The story told by an idiot full of noise and fury
and that means nothing. “
So, life is a kind of current
which we have neither the ins and the outs,
and the image, like any work of art,
is there to give a moment of coherence in the flow of life.
There, we have a painting by Malevich
who was challenged because he was very radical
which dates from the beginning of the century, 1919,
and even if there is not much in this picture,
he has a frame, so he has a limit, outside the box there is nothing,
and everything happens inside that frame.
And so, it is a coherence in itself.
In my opinion, the characteristic of all works of art,
it’s that they have a beginning, an end,
that there is a composition in this image,
and it has a coherence, and it gives coherence to life.
This story of giving meaning to life,
we find it in works that will tell stories.
That’s the Bayeux tapestry, which dates from around 1100,
which tells the conquest of England by William the Conqueror.
It is a tapestry that is 70 m long,
which is one of the first comics
which tells in detail all the adventures of this conquest of England.
This painting, this art also makes icons, so meaning,
we create an idealization,
characters, things, etc.,
and it helps to make sense.
So, we also make icons.
And then after a while,
the painting will also try to rub the real,
to history, in the course of things,
and try to go see if behind the official story
there are no less prestigious things.
There, Goya paints us an execution scene of the Spanish resistance fighters
by the armies of Napoleonic conquests,
in 1810, I believe.
He testified through very raw drawings
the horrors of war practiced by the French,
and we will see as we go
paintings that will tell things a little less official and harder,
like Picasso’s Guernica,
and who are going to confront things a little more trivial,
so it’s the irruption of the people,
we will rub against the prohibitions of representation,
mainly around sexuality,
with different works presented quickly,
of religion, the representation of the religious,
who will come to rub against some forbidden,
some dogmas and some icons,
and the Last Temptation of Christ
which inevitably gives rise to friction with the raising of shields
some advocates of the protection of their icons,
and politics of course,
with a caricature of Louis-Philippe by Daumier,
Topor caricaturing De Gaulle,
like, tutelary figure who is criticized by the drawing.
Art will also rub against the art itself,
who became an icon through a number of works,
who will question the style, the implication in his universe,
with iconic things,
you saw those pictures,
who come at one point to question meaning and meaning.
We end with this image of Duchamp,
who scribbled a goatee and a mustache to the Mona Lisa,
by “deciphering”,
attacking a strong symbol of art with these letters: “LHOOQ”,
which means: “She’s hot in the ass”.
And we come back to this problematic image
and that was very criticized,
trying to explain how she tells something,
she is apparently cruel, mean, unstoppable,
and this image tells us something
of the fracture of our society,
between one side, a child who dies on a beach,
and next, a consumer society.
We have the same problem with this image,
where we see that we have two different behaviors
in the appreciation of events:
on the one hand, a lot of emotion about Aylan,
and on the other, something much more negative
compared to the Munich incident,
with amalgam and a bit of racism.
These drawings come to rub us on it,
and question us about the meaning we give to things.
After, we have things a little more compassionate
regarding Aylan,
which border in my opinion, bad taste and ridicule,
so much we want to be in the compassionate.
What I would like to say,
there are three important elements in humor.
The first is to put the emotional distance.
From the moment we do humor,
we are no longer in the compassionate, we are no longer in the amiable, etc.,
and laughter makes you think about the meaning of things.
Secondly, humor is also a social criticism.
To laugh is to be surprised.
We laugh at a fall, because he should not have fallen.
He also has that function.
The third thing very important, and in my opinion fundamental,
it’s that humor is a connivance.
When we do humor with people we know,
we can laugh at the same things.
As soon as the humor comes out of the circle and there is no longer this connivance,
there may be misinterpretation
and we can fall into problems that we have met
on the interpretation of the drawings,
among others, those of Charlie Hebdo.
Finally, an image of Goya,
whose text written on the block
says that the sleep of reason produces monsters.
So we are in this context.
And then I finish with a drawing of Reiser,
one of the most talented designers and the most in-house,
and that is for those who may not have heard everything.
Thank you all.
(Applause)
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