PRESENTATIONS OF THE BOOK

Presentation of the book at the Guillaume Budé – Les Belles Lettres bookstore, Paris, on May 14, 2014, with,  from left to right : Raphaël Cuir, ORLAN, the author, Bernard Andrieu and Marc Jimenez.

 

Foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy

 

For a depth to be equal to its surface, and exhaust and exalt itself in it, is doubtless what makes the skin detached from the body, or the body turned inside out in its skin, a body of desire and sensual pleasure whose insistence your work records as a major motif of what haunts the contemporary concern over the possible meaning of ‘art’.

 

 Jean-Luc Nancy (excerpt from the foreword)

 

 

Afterword by François Dagognet

 

“Without quoting in its entirety this masterly work – which sheds light on the processes of all those who, perhaps unwittingly, have taken inspiration from the Apollonian and no less Dionysian myth – I want to highlight one of the original features of this set. (…) Stéphane Dumas rejects the continuity of art history which becomes dematerialized. By arranging the skin (detached and most of all treated, thinned and hardened) on the outside, it is deprived of its depth. Stéphane Dumas is opposed to a replacement that diminishes it and loses it. The Marsyas myth has helped him to recognize the depth and the dialectic that animates the skin’s essence. Instead of envisaging it as an envelope or bag for innards, let’s see it as a dynamic model. (…) The techniques of the medium have overlooked the medium, or have devitalized and exhausted it. Stéphane Dumas’s book has contrived to bring it back to life.”

 

François Dagognet (excerpt from the afterword)

 

Presentation by Marc Jimenez

 

“The fate meted out to the insolent satyr and musician Marsyas, who dared to challenge Apollo, for Stéphane Dumas becomes the very paradigm of plastic and aesthetic creation. We read in the Dionysiaca by Nonnus of Panopolis, “The god stript off his hairy skin, and made it a windbag. There it hung high on a tree, and the breeze often entered, swelling it out into a shape like his, as if the shepherd could not keep silence but made his tune again”.

Stéphane Dumas turns this myth into an artistic principle: the skin of the flayed-alive satyr, a “polymorphous windbag”, is no mere cast-off: not only is the grim trophy turned into a quivering, singing skin, it becomes a major instrument of creation as Marsyas the musician survives in his tegument and imposes himself as the material of art. The Apollo-Marsyas pair, says Dumas, can then be interpreted as the model of the creative process; the artist is one who is symbolically flayed, turning his skin inside out to show its thickness, the flesh, as the medium of our representations of the world.

This leaves the “work” of this skin to be analyzed, diagnosed and interpreted, and the various modes identified, in the practices of different artists in different periods, from ancient art to bio-art, in which it surfaces, or rather is revealed on the surface, exudes in efflorescences, secretions, tremors, emergences and concretions, becomes palpable, perceptible, liminal. Stéphane Dumas excels in this way of devising an enthralling, fascinating aesthetics of liminality.”

 

Marc Jimenez