ISSN: 1705-6411
                                   
Volume 7, Number 2 (July, 2010)

Olivier Mosset: The Cold Joy of Painting Degree Zero

Dr. Gerry Coulter

(Bishop's University, Sherbrooke, Canada)

I. Introduction

1. Olivier Mosset. Exhibition at Venice Biennale (1990)

My paintings are interesting because they are not so interesting (Olivier Mosset).

After seeing the paintings of Olivier Mosset at the 1990 Venice Biennale Jean Baudrillard wrote that we him owe a debt of gratitude (2001:139). Mosset’s career as an artist has been a thoughtful interrogation of an art world that frustrates him. He understood early on that the avant-garde was dead and that art must challenge both art and the art world’s understanding of it. From his experiences we learn a good deal about what it has been like to be a painter after the end of the avant-garde in an art world that does not recognize the death of the avant-garde. The problem, which Mosset still struggles with today (at 66), is that the art world absorbs everything that ventures close to it. Mosset’s life as an artist has been a record of a thoughtful theoretician and strategist who has negotiated the paradoxical terrain which includes his need to paint and an art world which attempts to force artists into complicity.

II. The Art of Vengeance

I considered my painting a critique of the art market and of the uniqueness of the art object, and a critique, as well, of sensitive and expressionist aspects (Mosset in Bovier and Cherix, 2003:127).

2. Mosset. Untitled (1974). Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland

The physical artifact that comes from painting – the art object, is never far from Mosset’s thoughts. His is not a search for any “pictorial truth” (he long ago rejected the concept), but for an art of challenge. Mosset’s career has been one in which the artist constantly battles for the control over his images and his ability to define them. In the end no artist can overcome the commodification of his /her works but Mosset has pressed further than most in an effort to contest his own incorporation into the art world. His painting has consistently come very close to the quest for formal purity only to show that the artist has no interest in it. His ability to execute repetitive forms over a long period of time speaks to his level of commitment. Between 1966 and 1974 he painted circles (over 200 of them) each called Untitled (oil on canvas, 100cm x 100 cm). They defy op-art and they surpass Duchamp’s roto-reliefs and Jasper Johns targets. In the end they leave us with nothing but a circle – a beacon of emptiness. In 1987 the black circle disappeared in his smooth reply to Rauschenberg’s white paintings. For Your Eyes Only assumes a more ironic posture than Rauschenberg’s white paintings of the early 1950s however as it comes at the peak of post modern painting. As the future of painting was being debated Mosset produces a work that, like so much of his art, evacuates the possibility of an avant-garde. He never saw himself as part of modernism, neo-modernism, neo-geo, or postmodernism [although he said he found neo-geo interesting (Ibid.:131)].

3. Mosset. For Your Eyes Only (1987). Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, USA

Like Daniel Buren, Mosset also painted stripes in the 1970’s, returning to them in the late 1980s. Along with Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni, Mosset was part of the radical BMPT Group which attempted to destabilize museal culture by taking their geometric works into the street and the subway to encourage a broader public dialogue concerning art – especially geometric abstraction. Much of Mosset’s outlook, which has persisted well beyond its writing, is contained in the manifesto of the BMPT Group:

“Because painting is a game,
Because painting is the application (consciously or otherwise) of the rules of

composition,

Because painting is the freezing of movement,
Because painting is the representation (or interpretation or appropriation or

disputation or presentation) of objects,

Because painting is a springboard for the imagination,
Because painting is justification,
Because painting serves an end,
Because to paint is to give aesthetic value to flowers, women, eroticism, the daily

environment, art, Dadaism, psychoanalysis and the War in Vietnam,

We are not painters”(in Stiles and Selz, 1996:71)

4. Mosset. Untitled (1973). Collection Le Consortium, Dijon

These standardized art works operate in the opposite direction of geometric abstraction which was a deeply aesthetic movement. Mosset apprehends the technique of flat geometric painting in a way that produces an anti-aesthetic and in so doing problematizes the decorative nature of most abstraction. Untitled (1973) has more in common with minimalism and conceptual art than with geometric abstraction. Placing such works outside the museum walls (in the street, the subway, on billboards) illustrates how dependent on context our understanding of art is. As was the case with his white canvas of 1987, Gone West of the same year, returns us to some of the deep problems in contemporary art history which the museum seeks to avoid. Ironically, avoidance can now only be maintained by including them. The presence of this work inside a museum affirms only the failure of the art world to acknowledge its own intellectual stagnation.

5. Mosset. Gone West (1987). Collection FRAC, Dijon.

Mosset has long spoken of his art itself in a challenging manner as he is never satisfied with it. Art is a negative affair for him constantly engaged with the oppressive forces of the art world which restrict every artist no matter how thoughtful or shrewd. He is a man trapped between the desire to create (he never gave up painting) and the coercive strictures of the society which await the work. Even the leading geometric abstractionists did not appreciate flatness or the necessity of the painted canvas to constantly point beyond the frame. If we wish to label Mosset perhaps we should put him in his own school of ironic-abstraction. When his relatively worthless canvases began to take on an escalated value in the art market of the 1980s he began to poke fun at them in his titles (such as Taster’s Choice – the name of a globally marketed instant coffee).

6. Mosset. Taster’s Choice (1988). Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland.

It is an interesting statement on the current intellectual state of the official art world that no matter how hard an artist struggles for worthlessness (using garbage in a matter of fact manner, “Bad Painting”, etc., the art world resists by heaping increasing value on the work. Mosset can only shake his head. In an effort to further subvert originality in the time of art’s most fierce commodification Mosset made one work which was completed by Andy Warhol adding his signature.

7. Mosset and Andy Warhol. Untitled (1979, 1985). Private Collection.

Perhaps Mosset recognized that, so long after the end of the avant-garde, we may as well appropriate and hurl the historical artifacts of the art world at its hungry jaws. While we are at it we may as well hand them another tomb-stone (the black monolith Untitled of 1983).

8. Mosset. Untitled (1983). Private Collection, New York

Mosset’s paintings concern the disappearance of painting in a way that challenges the viewer to ask “what am I looking at” more than they give any pleasure. Unlike geometric abstraction, Mosset’s painting is an act of retribution which envelopes any museum wall on which it hangs with pathos. When Rauschenberg made his black paintings he was searching for an art after the end of the avant-garde. Mosset’s work is without sentiment, nostalgia, or hope. His only interest in painting is in the flatness of it, in the application of paint to the surface of a canvas and the limits of doing so (Ivey, 2003:25). In this he remains an artist but to frame him as a neo-modernist or post modernist is as ridiculous as saying the same thing of Duchamp. Mosset and Duchamp hold the same questions but Mosset forces them in a medium Duchamp could not.

9. Mosset. Fridge (1986). Private Collection, Barcelona.

Mosset’s artistic life has been dedicated to the creation of conceptual conundrums such as Fridge (1986). He distinguishes the nature of painting from how it is shown (Bovier and Cherix, 2003:128). As such, his art is not as much about the finished work as it is: 1) the process of its making, and 2) what happens to it after it enters the art world. There his work is intended to demystify and in this the titles became increasingly important in the reception of the work – such as None of your Goddam Business. If there is any joy in Mosset’s art it is a cold one. Perhaps, with a nod to Barthes notion of “writing degree zero”, we can say that Mosset’s absence of pretension for aesthetic style exhibits a kind of instrumentality – or painting degree zero (see Barthes, 1967:77). For Barthes, like Mosset, it is the zero degree which resists mythology (Barthes, 1972:132). For Baudrillard the zero degree of culture is also the scene of the power of the deliberately uncultured (1988:78). Mosset has long cut the figure of the knowing peasant – a role Baudrillard was also very fond of playing. Like Derrida who continued to write in order to deconstruct language, Mosset continued to paint in order to question painting as an historical object.

10. Mosset. None of Your Goddam Business (1986). Private Collection (Connecticut, USA)

III. Conclusion

 
11. Mosset. Beach Towel (1993).Private Collection, New York.

For Olivier Mosset the art gallery serves as a kind of weapon and the work therein becomes about the space it inhabits. In its own way Mosset’s art is a lasting memorial to the end of the avant-garde. The art of Olivier Mosset is thus a lamentation. Therein lies his importance for no one has better understood and lived the problem artists face in an art world that cannot recognize the end of the avant-garde. Baudrillard was right – we do owe Olivier Mosset a debt of gratitude for making his decoys – and for living an artistic life of thwarted exchange with an art world that will not fully recognize their intellectual depth. Think for a moment how a work like Beach Towel or Fridge can bring the entire oeuvre of an artist like Barnett Newman to its knees.

                  
12. Barnett Newman. Voice of Fire (1967).  Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada.

Inside the gallery Mosset’s work continues to take its engaging but under acknowledged vengeance. All that remains of geometric abstraction after its encounter with Mosset is its illusion – the zero degree of the idea of geometric abstraction. It was precisely the end of the avant-garde that made room for this provocateur and challenger. He is the great anti-artist of the last four decades of the twentieth century – I wonder if the art world will ever allow itself to discover this fact. Olivier Mosset has refused complicity while taking his vengeance on an art world that, if it ever recognizes the intended meaning of his work, may well evaporate into thin air.

Mosset has learned, since his days with BMPT, to carry on as a paradoxical artist:

I wish I could paint, destroy and start over – that is, in fact more or less what I do! The rest, how the works will be shown and their fate, is another matter. Today, my place in the art system and its history doesn’t interest me that much – although the economic factor is what allows one to continue or not! In the end, a correct formal solution to a formal problem is determined by the critique of the system that underlies it, and by showing the limits of such a critique. …It is problematic to participate in the contemporary scene, even in a critical manner because it is always a mark of support. Not to participate takes away the possibility of the right to criticize. …since and perhaps because of BMPT – I can go on today (Mosset in Bovier and Cherix, 2003:133).

13. Olivier Mosset (c2000).

Dr. Gerry Coulter is a Full Professor of Sociology (Art, Film, and Theory) at Bishop’s University, Canada. Recent peer review publications include: ‘Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence of Gaming’, SAGE Journal: Games and Culture (Volume 2, Number 4, December, 2007:358-365) and at: http://www.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/4/358; ‘The Poetry of Reversibility and The Other in The English Patient’, Widescreen Journal. (Volume 1, Number 1, April 2008): http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/15/14;
‘Baudrillard and Holderlin and the Poetic Resolution of the World’, Nebula, (Volume 5, Number 4, December 2008:145-164) and at: www.nobleworld.biz/Coulter.pdf. He also writes a quarterly column for Euro Art (On-line) Magazine (http://www.euroartmagazine.com. Dr. Coulter’s teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions most recently by Bishop’s University’s highest award for teaching the William and Nancy Turner Prize. He is the Founding and Managing Editor of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (On the Internet): (www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies). Email: gcoulter@ubishops.ca

References

Jean Baudrillard (1988). America. New York: Verso.

Jean Baudrillard (2001). “The Object That is None”. In The Uncollected Baudrillard (Edited by Gary Genosko). London: SAGE, pages 138-39.

Roland Barthes (1972 [1957]). Mythologies. [Paris: Editions du Seuil]. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.

Roland Barthes (1967 [1953]. Writing Degree Zero. [Paris: Editions du Seuil]. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lionel Bovier and Christophe Cherix (2003). “Interview with Olivier Mosset” in Yves Aupetitallot et. al. (2003) Olivier Mosset: Works – 1966-2003. Milan: Editions 5 Continents, pages 125-133.

Paul Eli Ivey (2003). “A Rendez-vous With Painting After Duchamp: The conceptual Monochromes of Olivier Mosset” in Yves Aupetitallot et. al. (2003) Olivier Mosset: Works – 1966-2003. Milan: Editions 5 Continents, pages 19-26.

Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (1996). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A sourcebook of Artist’s Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press.