NOTE: On Pierre Leguillon

From ENTER AND AFFINED (an essay)

I have written to the French artist Pierre Leguillon. I have written about writing. I have written about writing this essay. I have written about writing this essay as a kind of homage to his work, to his curatorial approach to making art. I have written about making this essay a sort of tribute to the ways in which he focuses on aspects of an artist’s output that everybody else has overlooked.

Artist’s calling cards. Ad Reinhardt’s slides. Photographic reproductions of Carl Andre’s floor pieces. Debuffet’s typography. Diane Arbus’s commercial work.

I wrote him, ‘I am in the process of composing an essay. It involves a meditation on your most recent book project, Oracles.’

‘I would love to know more about the development over the years of your art-making practice, the ways in which you moved from a scholarly interest in art history to the making of art through exhibitions and through books.’

‘Oracles, your book about artist calling cards, is a sort of exhibition in the form of a book. The way facsimile reproductions of these cards are displayed  between its pages. The ways the short essays that compose every chapter, chapters which you label ‘Deals’ (the cards are dealt and played?), indirectly interact, respond to one another. Speak. It is this constellational approach to the aesthetic and the biographical material that I find particularly compelling.

‘But there is one artist who I am especially drawn to in the book, someone who is commanding my attention more or less completely.’ And I asked him about his relationship with the French-Israeli artist Absalon, ‘I understand that you and he were friends?,’ attempted to convey to him how the Absalon material was continuing to grow, how it was branching out, beginning to distort the process of my work, and making rampant and oblique connections, often with the lives and works of other artists, most of whom are figures who are not themselves contained inside his book, but who have now become a part of this essay, despite my impotent objections, half-hearted protestations, my self-deceptive listing of objectives, I am trying now to write.

Though shortly after beginning writing I got stuck. I had to stop and start again.

Like Moby Dick, Oracles opens with a series of quotations, one brief quotation taken from every one of its eighteen ‘Deals.’ These serve, perhaps, as headnotes, cornerstones dividing its thematic space.

‘I will first make a series of preliminary statements,’ it is the beginning of one of Pierre Leguillon’s Non-Happenings after Ad Reinhardt, ‘what we call in French preambules, which you can see as curtains opening onto curtains.’

The word ‘preamble’ comes from Middle English. It derives from the Middle French word, preambule, which in turn derives from the Middle Latin praeambulum, which comes from the Late Latin neuter praeambulus, or walking in front.

Preamble, preambling, to amble before. Before walking, or moving in a leisurely manner.

To proceed without haste.

A ‘preamble’ is an introductory part, as to an essay or a book, or to a document, or a performance, or even to a lecture. It can also be read, more broadly, as an introduction or a preface to something larger.

A kind of pre-walk, or rehearsal for the event itself, whatever this event might, in the end, turn out to be.

A preface also points before it, somewhere else. It is something forward because it comes before.

It is the first curtain opening.

‘Forwards,’ writes Fred Moten, the theorist and poet, ‘are cardings that ought to be, but can’t quite be, discarded.’

The way that calling cards, that nineteenth century staple of polite society, once presented people to one another. These were cardings that were not supposed to be discarded, it would not have been polite, for they came before the person to whom they once belonged, standing in for them, one might even say, representing them. They mark an introduction, passageway, they introduce (traduce? betray?) through their own materiality, their choice of color, through their font.

The recipient may use this card to go forward, gain entrance underneath, to undo, at least partially, the first curtain before the name, by paying, and there is, inevitably, always a price, a visit to the person to whose name this card belongs.

Though each time the recipient of this card pays a visit to this same person, assuming they will pay this visit more than once, the person being visited is someone else.

The same holds true of Leguillon’s Non-Happenings, these lectures, followed by slides taken from the estate of Ad Reinhardt, for each one ‘is always both a repetition of the last one and a rehearsal for the next.’

‘So let’s just say that I’m doing some preparatory studies, some sketches, that happen live and that cannot be reproduced.’

These introductory texts, these forwards or cardings, Moten goes on to write, are ‘terraced airings of tangle, smoothing out refusals of smoothing, defibering with dried fibers in bright Farben, preparing spinning with caressive compact.’

To fold and then unfold. To caress.

And fold again.

This compact caressiveness that calling cards possess. They announce themselves in fewer words. Their concision can appear to make them cryptic, even oracular in what they won’t announce.

An oracle is a means, or a place, or an instrument of revelation.

And Oracles, a book of written constellations, composed around the calling cards of artists, cards that have been sequenced,  grouped, dealt out as ‘Deals’ (the names its chapters have been given; one thinks of them as ‘dealings’ – forged and then arranged – with material) and edited by Leguillon, is precisely such a book.

Perhaps the quotations at the beginning of Oracles also constitute its preface. The preliminary aspect may simply reside in their having come first. It is the book’s forward part. The Forward as – in, medias res. We are already in it when we start. Much the way that Henry James’ prefaces simply come before. They do not purport to explain or  simplify our way. They do not pre-figure. The Forward is already inside. It is that which faces the reader upon entering. It is the pre-face or Forward taking us further inside the book.