6 Garence Chabert and Aurélien Mole, “Artistes iconographes”, Art 21 no. 25, Winter 2009/2010, pp. 18-27. Our translation. 7 Both were published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam.
part of it. In The Apse, the Bell and the Antelope (video, 2005), a fixed camera frames the words and gestures of Roger Tomalty, one of the centre’s managers, as he explains the architectural and social project of Arcosanti. Behind him, the viewer perceives some details of the background — at times Soleri’s architecture, at times the desert, or a cross section of one of the buildings — as the tension between what is told and what isn’t shown intensifies. Aurélien Froment’s art lies in the definition of the narrator’s position: he lets others speak but he is the one who defines the frame and mode of the narration. Olivier Franceschi, curator of his exhibition in Paris, notes that the artist easily appropriates various roles depending on the project: the historian, the scientist, the pedagogue, the visionary. A collector, not of stones, but of stories and images. Another article on Froment’s work uses the term Astronomist iconographer to indicate such art practices based on the recollection, selection and arrangement of images in “loose associations”. “An iconology of intervals. In astronomy, a constellation is a group of stars assembled by the figure they draw in the sky. These stars are not related by any significant gravitational force, nor any common origins; in a sense, it is an arbitrary and subjective ensemble with no astrophysical value. However, the drawing that brings them together allows them to be identified and to detach themselves from the infinity of stars in the universe. … Unlike the archive, where the filing system erases the image’s specificities, the constellation, considered as an articulated set, amplifies the polysemy of each part.”6 Koenraad Dedobbeleer is such an ‘astronomist iconographer’, a postcard and book collector, a sculptor. He is most expert in analogical thinking through images, a skill he employs in several publications. His book Œuvre sculpté, travaux pour amateurs (2012) and the subsequent Compensating Transient Pleasurable Excitations (2014)7 consist in a series of images, reproduced from books, collected postcards, photographs by the author, and his own sculptures. The reader is unable to explain their sequence, which is certainly meaningful, but loose. The use of text is very accurate. For example, in Œuvre sculpté… only three textual devices develop in words what the image leaves open to interpretation. The first, in the frontispiece, is this inscription:
THE ARGUMENT How meandering around objects gets to be the subject of a short story. This narrative gets divided into 71 chapters, whose content is more often than not contradicting one another in order to create an assumption of what the constitution of things might be. In place of the usual introductory note to a book, the second device is the reproduction of a four-page folder published by a New York art gallery in 1952, with a text by Tristan Tzara on Kurt Schwitters and his collages, translated by Marcel Duchamp. The text is itself a collected document. It begins the series of 71 documents, while its fourth page, the back cover, is displaced at the very end of the sequence, enclosing the collection. The third textual element are the tiles of the nine sculptures featured in the book, The Gradual Formation of a Landscape, Contemporary Is the Man, not Style, Guilt Is in the System, Simply a Logical Consequence, The Subject of Matter (for WS), An Archaic Word for a Gift, Painstakingly Realistic, The Harder They Fall, the Harder They Crash ’Em and Thought Apart From Concrete Realities. The semantic field they evoke, distant from the object they are related to, enables them to function dialectically, as an image against the other, so that all parts of the book work on the same level, be it artwork, references, titles, introduction. A montage of associations and dissociations creating a ‘constellation’, a visual narrative based on distant ‘facts’. For his contribution on this issue a similar protocol has been used. Reacting to the first issue of Accattone and to the other contents of this issue, he proposed to compose an essay out of his collection of museum postcards. The sequence of twenty ghostly pictures is — in his words — “a rather simple thing, but at the same time telling about history, art history, architecture and architecture history. A mix through the eyes of an amateur. Images without words, only the captions of the cards.” The title almost gives his selection the tone of a scientific demonstration: Obvious Truths Within Cultures Are Often the Things that Are Not Said nor Directly Acknowledged. Persistent figures and architectural memories travel from postcard to postcard, just as the white wall of Baukunst’s studio is scattered with black and white prints of architectural histories: a detective’s pinboard of affinities
73