The play on the real
Transference of the real and its reconstitution, dismantling and
remounting of the image, functional detour of the object. Roland
Baladi is a perfect example of Huizinga's cherished "homo ludens".
Whatever medium he uses, watercolor or video electronics or
marble, Baladi makes a practice of playing the object against its
function. A vast gained taking diverse and anodyne forms, and upon
which perhaps our whole culture is based.
In early September 1979, at the opening in Paris of the Forum des
Halles, Baladi presented "Tondo", a Super8
projection in the round of recorded images of open sky. In this
particular case the camera played the role of a peri-scope which
fixes and displaces at the same time: fixing the visual subject,
image of a reality no longer existent (the Paris sky at the moment
the photos were taken).
When the artist reproduces in marble objects char-acteristic of
contemporary design: digital calculator or typewriter, the working of
the transference/displacement of the real is even more evident. The
functional object's practical value is reduced to zero, and for this
value is substituted the esthetic fetishism of the form, united with
the material. |
We know well how the everyday objects of our
grandparent end up: tools, lamps, warming pans, revolvers. How and
where: they come to decorate our mantelpieces or living room walls,
after a brief stint in the purgatory of the flea market or antique
dealer.
All seems to indicate that Roland Baladi takes a supreme pleasure
in accelerating the process of fetishization of the object of our
memory. He nimbly anticipates the normal time span of the object's
functional destiny, and plunges it all at once into the universe of
our collective memory.
The use of marble is not gratuitous; rather it is willfully
funerary: Baladi consecrates the object's death to the world of
design and its rebirth to the memory world of the craftsman. The
immediate is fixed in the past, in the same way that Lot's wife was
transformed into a pillar of salt; just as the statues at the
cemetery of Genes monumentalise the final, fatal moment of the one
whose tomb they ornament.
Simulacrum certainly, this detour of the real by way of its
function and duration. A simulacrum of anti design which creates a
new design, a crafted product holding a privileged place in our
memory and endowed with the maximum possible of constitutive
ambiguities, since it sets off in our memories the realms of art,
kitsch, and gadget, ail at the same time.
Here are the very modem fetishes which must be exorcised if our
sensibility is to be the currency of Nature at large. Roland Baladi's
ambition is high: if the play on the real is the world's symbol, life
becomes absolute art.
Pierre Restany Oct 1978 |