Jean-Hubert Martin Science Fiction A Dialogue between Science and Fiction Apropos of Thomas Huber

Fiction: This guy writes pretty well!
Science: Yes, but without the painting, it would be nothing.
Fiction: Not so sure about that; his texts are far from being descriptive. They have their autonomy and their own narrative qualities. Reading them without knowing the painting, you couldn't reconstruct the picture.
Science: Do they state ideas that presided over the creation of the work or expound some commentaries meant to enlighten the viewer?
Fiction: Even if at first they overlap with the artist's initial intentions, the texts quickly take off on their own. They gain in independence thereby and engender by themselves their own evolution and their own dramaturgy. The same thing goes, too, for the images. When Thomas Huber begins to draw a space, he is far from knowing what its final configuration is going to be and with what objects it is going to be furnished.
Science: But before drawing the constituent elements of his composition, he names them. This prior naming yields the subject matter of a text.
Fiction: I see what you are getting at: you want to restart the old debate about the word's preeminence over the image. In short, the chicken or the egg. Did the painters of the Lascaux caves or the newcomers of the Chaumet cave say, in their Volapük, "horse" or "bison" before sketching silhouettes of them on the walls?
Science: Yes, that's an important question.
Fiction: No, it's a false problem, like most questions about origins. It serves only to make up myths, which are certainly needed to justify our present time on the basis of imaginary points of departure. When Huber draws a circle or, in perspective, an oval, he can call it a plate, a disk, or a mirror. At the moment he traces it, he still isn't sure about it. As he does it, what takes place is a determination that can itself influence the way of things (as Fischli and Weiss have shown in their video) by transforming the overall meaning or at least the network of relationships among certain objects.
Science: Well, but that's crazy. He ought to know what he is doing. He's the author! If not, there's no longer any creation; we're smack in the middle of determinism.
Fiction: It's not as easy as that. There's a true interaction that grants a certain freedom and independence to the work itself. A genuinely visual form of thinking is set up in the artist so that he can imagine hitherto unknown spaces and combinations of forms. The mental conception of a space or of an abstract form is worked out without the aid of words. One thinks "bison" but one does not think "wall," "floor," "ceiling," "angle," "edge," "light," and so on, when one imagines a nonexistent space. The mental representation goes faster than the designation of the elements. As for the whole, the words "hall," "room," and "space" say nothing about its qualities. They appear only once painted, with inevitable changes as compared to the initial mental representation. These spaces exist only when laid down on the surface and yet we project ourselves into them immediately. The viewer is transformed into a stroller who walks within these interiors and feels their spatial sensations. He sees himself making these steps and thus remains on the outside. Contrary to a physical experience of space, whose presence becomes irresistible when a tangible relationship is established between the body and its environment, the judging mind retains here its free will. It analyzes its relation to this interior but sees itself acting from the outside. It is at once within and without.
Science: There's nothing tangible in all that. Two-dimensional representations of space provide but a very poor idea thereof. They are deceptive and cannot be substituted for reality.
Fiction: You are living in a Euclidean world with a Cartesian grasp of things. Now, mental life and the kind of experience artists are capable of developing go far beyond the self-enclosed systems you are privileging.
You'll find it hard to believe me, I know, but Huber doesn't just project himself into his painting; he really lives within it. There is no difference for him between the three-dimensional reality in which we move around and the reality represented in his paintings. How could it be otherwise for him, since he lives only to nourish and develop the city he has conceived: Huberville? He conceives of architecture as the skin of the social body. Like a living being, it ages, dies, and regenerates itself.
Science: But all that is just a pure poet's fabrication. If he tries to enter into one of his pictures, he will just be doing a bad Lucio Fontana or a very poor Saburo Murakami(1), and he'll find himself sheepishly standing behind the picture.
Fiction: To understand him, you must at least know where he is coming from. He carries with him a heavy genetic inheritance. As with shamans, the power is transmitted from father to son. Now, his father was one of those Swiss architects who utterly fought in favor of modernity with a view toward raising and bettering the population's standard of living. When he was quite little, he fell one day into a great big barrel of blue BASF paint. This particularly intense hue his parents were using to cover a wall in his room was later to gain a certain celebrity when Yves Klein made use of it for his IKB monochromatic works. The memory of this wall and of the event is to be found again in the painting 1954. Tokio (Tokyo, 1954), which shows his mother with the couple Walter Gropius and Charlotte Perriand. The adults were so deeply immersed in their discussion that they didn't notice anything. He was pulled out before he drowned: his parents got off with a blue fright and he became blue from it [ses parents en furent quitte pour une peur bleue et lui en devint bleu]. This is what explains the almost dazed look of astonishment he often casts on the spectacle of the world from behind his glasses.
Science: I understand quite well that the poor little guy must have been traumatized by this accident. Nevertheless, you are not going to convince me that he would, on this account, have become a reincarnation of the comic-book character Obelix!
Fiction: But yes I am. And I'm even going to prove it to you. Huber fell into the "magic potion" when he was little, but you can benefit from the same magic powers. All you need to do is to imitate the cult-image of Belmondo painting his face with blue paint in Pierrot le Fou.
Science: I'd sure like to paint my face blue with that war paint, but don't count on me to go kamikaze. I don't have any desire to blow myself up.
Fiction: Now that you have a blue head, approach the large canvas standing before you, which is resting on a very low easel. Raise your foot to cross the threshold and you are going to find your feet planted smack dab in the picture.
Science: I would not have thought it possible! Here I am on the other side of the mirror. I apprehend a virtual reality and travel through it without the sound of my steps being heard. A strange silence reigns here. This resounding chilliness heightens all the more the colorful harmonies. The forms and colors make their presence felt with a force I have never before known. What a delight to look around. A state of total completeness: the space is coherent and it is equipped with forms and figures that make sense. Everything is there; no need for anything else. The artist must have a feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment beyond all desire.
Fiction: Don't you believe it! He has certainly perfected a language with its various codes, but each new series of works brings with it new suggestions and new questions. Formerly, his paintings were often the reflection of his private life and the vagaries thereof. Children are constantly making forays into them. The new series he presents here is, on the contrary, much more detached, all in all more abstract. You will notice that for the first time, it is not accompanied by a speech. That's something new in his work--a sign of maturity? It appears as a museum of spaces, one room connected behind another, each with its own character, its spatial subtleties, its luminous surprises, and its games of illusion. Imagine that you are no longer just in one of his paintings but that you are thus walking from room to room, as in an enormous castle in which the master of the house would have arranged this incredible sequence of playful environments.
To succeed in renewing his creative work in this way, the author must have the feeling that he is still far from perfection. Each time Huber gets down to work, he marshals pots of paint, chemical ingredients, forms, and lines of perspective to which he gives material form with a lot of taught strings* in his studio. When he has finished his painting, there always remain a few strokes and lines that couldn't find a place in the picture. They pile up like rubbish from a construction site in front of the work in progress. He then gathers them up in order to stick them into the next painting. But at its completion, he again finds himself with an excess of ingredients. It's Sisyphus or, more prosaically, the problem of that comic-book character the sapper Camembert, who was obliged over and over again to dig a new hole in order to put in it the dirt from the previous, inevitably overflowing one.
Science: While the artist sides with the sapper Camembert, I prefer to leave it to that other early French comic-book character, the scientist Cosinus. Perhaps he would be able to reveal the solution to the enigma of this kind of painting that combines surface and space with such conviction that I can move within it. What appears at first sight only as a play of forms and a cleverly laid-out surface area proves to be the result of a highly elaborate geometrical construction that creates a sense of depth.
Fiction: The artist has not hesitated to play on this ambivalence. Since you have entered into his pictorial space, you have become one of its figures, standing out on the background. Might Cosinus and Camembert have infiltrated Huber's painting? The figure-ground pair invites itself into a number of his works, Figure generally being embodied in a sort of monochromatic puppet. The metaphor is pursued rather extensively when the family environment is equated with the background, slipping the figure of the artist in front as a demiurge who is isolated in his quest for the absolute. I cannot forget the bafflingly simple image of a house that is entitled "Eine schreckliche Geschichte" (a scarey story). It tells the story of a painter who had locked up his family for four years inside the picture. Moreover, above the livingroom sofa of Thomas Huber´s house hung a painting that represented the room in question with a sign on the wall relating a domestic dispute. Exorcism or incantation of a spell? Are not these two examples additional proof that he lives within his painting--to the point of dragging his nearest and dearest into this "story-within-a-story": what we have is an abyss of real and represented nested spaces.
Science: Whence this incredible mastery of perspective on his part?
Fiction: He takes after his father on this score. When still just a kid, he helped his dad with the drawings required to enter architecture competitions that were always completed "on deadline" in the middle of the night. He excelled in rendering perspective. And as in every self-respecting artist's biography, the student soon overtook his teacher. Besides, his unknown craftsmanship (as compared to that of his father) had the advantage of not being identifiable by panel members. Having, as we saw, always bathed in paint, he dextrously swims on its surface and in its depths. He is continuing the modern tradition. And like his elders, he has his finger on the spell of Primitivism, as a stretcher with cabalistic forms reveals. The golden section and its secrets were yielded up to him in his baby bottle. For this reason, he distrusts the strategies and superstructures of the art world. He goes his own way, outside trends and fashions, which is not lacking in courage. He prefers his modest little bibliophile publications over big catalogues and the lived experience of art over the scrutiny of reproductions.
Science: You describe him as a marginal character, a bit of an "outsider," but has he not failed to tackle the issues of his time which conceptual artists have treated in innovative ways?
Fiction: Yes, but his originality is to believe deeply in painting as a means of gaining knowledge and not only as the expression of drives or of mental states, as is often the case in Germany. This conviction transcends rational explanations without, for all that, becoming mystical. It verges on the belief that painting transmits some information and knowledge beyond words. One need only go one step further to believe in its secrets which are jealously guarded by a caste of people in the know. Seeing, looking, appreciating, enjoying, and keeping silent. For, the artist has spoken a lot; but in art, one has never said everything. Now that he has eliminated speech and the walk-on players, isn't he seeking to get even nearer to the heart of the matter by opening up a new spatial box?

Jean-Hubert Martin

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