Schwarz
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The world becomes real to such a degree of reality that is bearable only by the way of a perpetual denial of the type :"This is not a world" (echoing the famous "This is not a pipe" of Magritte, as a surrealist denial of the evidence - Duchamp could just as well have said This is not a fountain). This double impulse of the absolute, definitive evidence of the world and of the equally radical denial of this evidence dominates the whole trajectory of modern art, but not only : all our perceptions and imagination of the world are affected. And it is not a question of moral philosophy or nos-talgia, as one would say : The world is not what it ought to be - or :The world is no longer what it was. No : the world is quite such as it is. Once all transcendance has been expelled, things are merely what they are, and such as they are, they are unbearable. They become immediately and totally real, without shadow, without comment. A giant ready-made. The reality is insuperable, but at the same time it doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist because it can no longer be exchanged for anything else. "Does reality exist ? Are we in a real world ? Such obsessive questions, which are the pervasive leit-motiv of our culture, simply expresses the fact that the world, trapped in the claws of reality, is bearable mow" only under the sign, in the shadow of the principle of Evil, that is in the form, whatever it may be, of a basic and radical denial. This is our double bind : since the world can no longer be justified in another world, it must be invested as real and released from all illusions (included, of course, the illusion of art, which no longer has any reason for being, except that of reinforcing this reality, as in the ready-made object), and at the same time we must go further and further into the denial of this reality, through the very impact of this negative countertransfer.