Borer (Alain) : Déploration de Joseph Beuys
The more time passes, the more distant this work becomes, which, having aroused commentary on a par with the greatest of the twentieth century, has, compared to them, the disadvantage but also the singular strength of having been incarnated by its author. A "life-work", in Borer’s terms, a work made flesh, in action and in discourse, necessarily unfinished, interrupted by death and consequently calling for throne, homage, commemoration, just as it aroused fascination, even idolatry, during the artist’s lifetime.
2021 / 11,5x16 cm / 128 p. / ISBN : 978-2-85035-031-3
In this erudite introduction to a work that "presents all the signs of a disturbing complexity and is one of those that cannot avoid a broad theoretical reflection," Alain Borer does not spare the myth unnecessarily. Raising in Beuys of the features knowingly christian and, in its course, a touch wanted of golden legend, its Deploration does not give in the hagiography ; it names without quibbling the appearance of "hackneyed", even of "artistic vagueness", and the spirit of seriousness of this "permanent conference", total counterpied of the art for the art. But the attentive examination of the problems raised by this man-work allows the tact and the talent of Borer to overcome them by naming the ambition, unclassifiable by dint of being totalizing, which confers to him what it is necessary to call in more than one way its greatness.
Analyzing the works and the performances in the whole and in the detail, exploring the figure of Beuys in concentric circles constituting so many avatars of an artist "pedagogue-herald-therapist-evolutionary-revolutionary", the homage of Alain Borer does justice to the one who was the author of a concept of art tirelessly widened to all the society ; who saw in every man an artist waiting to be awakened by being led back to the principles manifested by life and natural materials ; who professed very early the necessity of the reorganization of the relationship of humanity to its environment ; and who, armed with a tireless will to heal his native country, opened the way to the whole generation of German artists of the post-war period.
The poet, author, essayist and novelist Alain Borer was born in 1949 in Luxeuil-les-Bains. His fame depends above all on his qualities as a world specialist of Arthur Rimbaud. For thirty years, he devoted himself to poetry and to the study of the poet. He published several articles, wrote books and essays about him and went on his tracks through the world, especially during a trip to Ethiopia, thus going through all the places of Rimbaldie and keeping his findings in his rimbaldothèque.
After the centenary of Rimbaud’s death, Alain Borer, who is also an art teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Tours, started a second phase in his work. He published a novel, Koba, where the reader attends a real hunt to the gods in a universe halfway between myths and History, then a play and, still, poems in lyrical cosmic alleys, pataphysical books, and what he calls "noèmes". Then, in his story Le Ciel & la carte, this writer-traveler invites us to discover the "water people" aboard a boat through the South Seas, between hell and paradise.
