Michaël d’Auzon, « Morphisms »
Commentary by Anne Colson
(English version : Richard Somerset)

“To dance is to paint something in time and space.”

Michaël d’Auzon

 

Dance and painting; painting and dance. What have they in common? Perhaps, in their very essence, they have this in common: the force of silence in the gesture. This is language before the word; primordial communication.

The artist tells us: “The body does not lie; the body cannot lie.” The gesture strips the body to its ultimate nakedness; delivers up its archaic and fundamental energy. At the end of the eighteenth century, Willam Blake wrote: “Energy is the only life and it is from the body… Energy is eternal delight.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793.)

The energy of the body; the transcendence of the gesture: this is our subject. The gesture imprinted with the energy of life, the vibration of the energy of life. Its presence, its shape, even its colour.

“Morphisms” are the metamorphoses of what the artist calls “metadance”. It is about the meeting of the archaic self and the futurity of emergent technologies. The interaction gives rise to the language of “virtual choreography”, considered by the artist the ineluctable future of dance. Metadance expresses itself as the movement of that which can only express itself within. It depends on the capacity to see a whole which moves ceaselessly, which is dynamic in its essence. It attempts to glimpse a vision of the whole in movement, composing and becoming the being itself, like the Pindaric injunction to “become what you are”. It is related to the Nietzschean will to power, calling life towards the expansion of its own existence, as an expression of presence, of identity.

Metadance explores this notion of the transformation, of the tendency towards, the flux in the will to power. It appeals to flux in its thermodynamic sense, and also in that dynamic tension that underlies all technological innovation. In the digital age the domain of the possible no longer has any limits. Ubiquity, so long sought by man, becomes envisageable. Ubiquity: the possibility of existing in several places at the same time; the sense of a thorough connectedness with the world.

The state of flux implies both permanence and impermanence. Its appeal must derive from the fact that it relieves us of our sense of solitude and finitude. Flux is the river of Heraclitus, into to which we step again and again without ever stepping into the same river twice. We drift in its liquidity, perhaps in search of our lost amniotic origins.

We cannot help wondering what man really tends towards.

And the question brings to mind that implacable image in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey in which a foetus floats in space contemplating the earth like some new sort of deity. What is man’s future? What destiny is taking shape in his fantastic intelligence?

Metz, blitz'09 contemporary art biennale, 24.09.2009