THE BASE OF PROPRIETY

 

 

What are we? What do we create? What idea do we have of ourselves today? This piece of art reflects our human complexes, our postures and our impostures. The seat places in an abyss the relationships between subject and object, the ideal place and the real downside.

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Objects are magical formulas. They are human wishes exercised on realities. The seat is special, it is the quintessential identity object. It responds to humans where the fan responds to heat and the broom to dust. To be created, the seat questions humans as they feel and conceive themselves. We must understand that we are a conscious and a material subject. Understand that the object will treat us as we treated it. Understand that objects have two major powers which in this case expose the speculative desire of our consciousness in relation to its self-conception.

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A symbolic power. The object is meaningful and its name, whether it is the cause or the result, is the initial proof. For example, the word "seat" comes from the Latin sedes, -is, which means, among other things, domicile, foundation, anus, plate, body balance station... The seat is a broad term that refers to very earthly aspects of our presence. The seat is an expression of our materiality.

A reflecting power. Man is ambivalent, physical and psychic, animal and conscious, between real and ideal. The object also merges between the real and the ideal, it is a response of the ideal to the real and the real to the ideal. But man himself, being divided, desires answers to the real necessity and answers to the ideal necessity. This is why the objects we create, whether practical or superfluous, are always as sophisticated as the idea we have of ourselves regarding their function. The more the function of the object idealizes us, the more precious, symbolic, and aesthetic the object will be. The more the function of the object materializes us, the more negligible, insignificant, and unaesthetic the object will be. What leads from the most limiting real to the absolute ideal is the Totem. What leads from the absolute ideal to the most limiting real is the Taboo...

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This is why seats, as illusory totems, respond to the ideal human, the one who thinks, meditates, dreams, leaves pragmatic reality to become empirical cerebrality in pleasure and weightlessness. What we are looking for is the flying carpet in the sense of Foucault's heterotopia. But we forget that we are also real.

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Indeed, we have the seat for the ideal, what is the seat for the real? Is there a similar form projected by mass production and responding to the same imperatives, relieving humans, absorbing their pains, freeing them from gravity, freeing them from realities that appear simply as a cushion placed under their buttocks? The same polymeric support for astronauts attacking space?

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If the real and the ideal are confronted, there is certainly an antithesis at the symbolic level. What archetypal form that corresponds to the supreme seat would systematically exist at its own antipodes? What would, through the play of extremes, be undesirable to desirable, miserable to prestigious, hidden to exposed, dirty to clean, minimal to maximal, economical to expensive, shameful to honorable, common to rare, multiple to unique, degrading to valorizing, disposable to enduring, unpleasant to agreeable, minor to major, simple to complex, form to formlessness, useless to useful, sedentary to nomadic, totem to taboo... and always be a support for our rears. We had overlooked it, it is the hygienic protection.

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The Base of Propriety, composed in the form of a "bench-napkins", is a honest and impudent vision that sheds light on the powers of the object that instrumentalizes, symbolizes, and reflects our perception. The idea expresses the human being who fears the real and venerates the spirit, but the hybrid and eccentric seat puts our psychic duality to the test on several levels in order to explore its dead ends.

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Through the play of double vision, this object artificially triggers our very binary instinct, acceptance or rejection. This same game of equality in the face of difference is then the birth of raw or even useless questions because they are extremely polarized. Is it beautiful or ugly? Does appearance belong to identity? Is form the object? Is it a homogeneous or heterogeneous vision? Does one make the illusion of reality its counter-reality? Would existential truth be made up half of real imagination and half of imagined reality? Or even, curiously, from the outset, this false true question, neither vulgar nor brilliant, that of gender. Is it feminine or masculine? Is sex the basis or the culmination of conception? Humanly, beyond gender, are we the parent or the child of our world?

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The Base of Propriety exists as an object of Yin and Yang and manifests the interaction of natural duality simply as the union of opposites. It expresses that creation is between immanence and transcendence.

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Any consideration towards this seat distinguishes us as idealists deluded by their totems and taboos. While thoughts scatter, we disperse. The ideal posture is a real imposture. Vice versa and vice at the verso.