ATOPON
BOOKS

Carnet III

Marc Fichou​

 

Art

 

​French-American artist Marc Fichou invites us on a fascinating journey into his creative process with his third Carnet, or “Notebook,” filled with the thoughts, puzzles, and lines of inquiry that have guided his work over the years in a variety of media, from video installation to sculpture and painting. This book lies in between image and text, philosophy and art, nature and artifice, the human and the technical - not to mention French and English, even diary and fiction. Do we look at it or read it? Or are we practicing both at once, wrestling with the differences between seeing and thinking, contemplation and action, beauty and truth? Fichou takes this ambivalent experience as a starting point for explorations of a personhood that, defined since Descartes as a subjective “inner life” (core or essence) we control and express, feels increasingly decentered, networked, and cybernetic. His book is filled with paradoxes that for him attend this spatiotemporal change: Mobius strips, infinite sets, hypercubes, Torus shapes, and feedback loops all point to the emergent possibilities that exist for people who no longer exactly know themselves through traditional categories of identity, intention, autonomy. . .and indeed art itself. ​

 

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