By outlining in a single exhibition parallels between the thinking of Carolingian monk Rabanus Maurus, author in the manuscript In Praise of the Holy Cross (c. 847) and minimal and conceptual art, Jan Dibbets brings together the essence of his reflection and practice as a conceptual artist: the interpenetration of text and image. Make it New. Conversations with Medieval Art is presented at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France until 10 February 2019. The times, as we know, are anachronistic. This anachronism, however, must be distinguished from the various ‘revivalisms’ that marked modernity from the 19th century until postmodernism. Indeed, the anachronistic approach is not identical to a citation-based undertaking, but seeks—to borrow from Walter Benjamin, the tutelary figure of this trend—to create new ‘constellations’ that together reveal the ancient in the new and the new in the ancient. Nevertheless, we can but note our time’s predilection for the Middle Ages. In turn, medievalists are increasingly looking to the history of contemporary art to shine new light on their field. In general terms, referencing the Middle Ages has encouraged the emergence of a new art history in which the anthropology of images occupies a central place.
AN AHISTORICAL EXHIBITION
The exhibition Make it New. Conversations with Medieval Art. Carte Blanche to Jan Dib
bets resonates with this trend, while distinguishing itself from it through the originality of the perspective adopted. Here it is not the eye of a historian or theorist that is called upon but that of an artist. Organized by Jan Dibbets in collaboration with Charlotte Denoël, Chief Curator of the BNF Manuscripts Department and Erik Verhagen, an art historian specializing in the conceptual period, this event presents illuminated manuscripts by the Carolingian monk Rabanus Maurus with some thirty works associated with conceptual art, minimalism and land art. Dibbets discovered In Praise of the Holy Cross, a series of twenty-eight figurative poems executed between 810 and 814 by consulting the
BNF collections. The resulting exhibition from this ‘love at first sight’ reprises a formula that has become recurrent, that of contemporary art in dialogue with the collections of heritage institutions. The singularity of Dibbets’s proposition is, however, its formalist bias, which makes it, in fact, an ‘intentionally ahistorical’ exhibition, in the artist’s own words, rather than an anachronistic one. What captured Dibbets above all in Rabanus Maurus’s alto-medieval masterpiece is its timeless abstraction, which is based on the mathematical ordering of simple coloured forms and the interweaving of text and image.
In Praise of the Holy Cross follows in the tradition of carmina figurata, poems arranged in squares or in rectangles, always with the same number of letters. Placed within the text are figures that themselves contain other verses, which are highlighted by a chromatic effect at once simple and rich in symbolic signification. In the same way, the suite of poems’ composition follows arithmological principles that express the perfection of the world. The ensemble could even evoke modern calligrams, if only due to its complexity and virtuosity, unequalled even in its own time, which led to its being one of the most copied manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Dibbets’s approach does not seek to address these historical disparities. Although drawing inspiration from the matrix of the cross that structures Rabanus Maurus’s poems, the exhibition’s scenography avoids all pseudomorphic effects. Presented in display cases, in the centre of the gallery, the Carolingian manuscripts are separated from the contemporary works that surround them. These include paintings by Alain Charlton, Ad Dekkers, François Morellet and Niele Toroni, drawings by Sol LeWitt, poems and a sculpture by Carl Andre, another sculpture by Richard Long, engravings by Donald Judd, photographs by Dibbets (including a series created for the exhibition in homage to Dekkers), and a substantial group of works on paper by Franz Erhard Walther, himself a connoisseur of Rabanus Maurus, a distant compatriot, also from Fulda, Germany. Some will question the complete absence of any female artists (Hanne Darboven, for example). But Dibbets asserts that his selection is intuitive and subjective.
IMAGE AS WRITING
In pursuing this freedom, Dibbets also presents some ten enlargements of reproductions of the Praise pages, as he did for the exhibition Pandora’s Box at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2016, the first exhibition he organized, in which he proposed a very personal re-reading of the history of photography. At the BNF, the repro
ductions have been reframed to highlight the manuscripts’ purely formal qualities. Seemingly sacrilegious, this double ‘gesture’ by Dibbets in fact echoes medieval artistic culture, which ignored the notion of the original. The artist thus invites us to reflect on the parallels between Middle Ages’ scriptural practices and photography, particularly conceptual photography, of which he is a leading proponent. Like photographic images in conceptual art, these reproductions have an ambiguous status: for Dibbets they are neither documents nor original works with all the notions of fetishism that can contain. In a similar way, the example of Rabanus Maurus’s manuscripts encourages us to rethink the thorny question of iconoclasm in conceptual art. As Denoël points out in the exhibition catalogue, Carolingians adopted a moderate position in the fight between iconoclasts and iconophiles. Praise brilliantly demonstrates the richness of this median path by bringing together the mimesis, which governs the representation of figures, and an aniconical mode of visualization, which involves placing the letters of the text in space. In a similar way, and as Erik Verhagen notes in his analysis of Dibbets’s work, conceptual art does not necessarily imply a renunciation of representation, but rather a new articulation of the visible and the invisible. However, what makes this approach possible in figurative poems is first of all the interpenetration of text and image. The material of the figures, let us remember, is textual. While this process is, once again, not exclusive to Rabanus Maurus, Praise is an exemplary demonstration of the fluidity with which text can be condensed into images and the image can reveal a textual framework. In the same way, it is the image as a graphic or writing that was rediscovered in the 1960s, both in the artistic field and in the human sciences, as shown in particular in the exhibition of works by Andre, Morellet, Toroni and Walther. In this respect it is significant that Dibbets borrows his title from a poet, Ezra Pound. A great lover of the Middles Ages and anachronistic before his time, if that’s possible, it was also Pound who said: ‘It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time.’(1)
Translation: Bronwyn Mahoney (1) Ezra Pound, Make It New: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 19.