Continuous moment: the studio as time machine

Continuous Moment: Le Desir...is an extended project which uses as a departure point two interpretations of Picasso’s play Le Desir Attrape Par La Queue - a 1944 reading in a Paris atelier which included Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jean Paul-Sartre and Jacques Lacan and other notable luminaries of the Parisian milieu, and a 1967 production organized by French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel in St Tropez as a component of the 4th Festival de la Libre Expression. Lebel brought the contemporary unstructured feel of the ‘Happening’ to Picasso’s text, and the nightly performances featured a psychedelic light show, nudity, projected video, and musical accompaniment by English psychedelic rock group Soft Machine, with various works by other known artists and identities artists contributing to the performance. Continuous Moment: Le Desir... recontextualises Picasso’s play, via Lebel’s interpretation, as a spatio/temporal collage incorporating various moments from the late 60’s, Paris during the Wartime occupation, and the works of various artists and authors which have influenced both Picasso’s original text and Lebel’s 1967 production. The tendency for Picasso to integrate references to artists and writers who influenced him into his work is discussed, and the corresponding approach Lebel took in the construction of his Happenings, which often included the work of other May 2009; reviewed December 2011; updated November 2012 artists, is explored as methodology which mirrored Picasso’s, leading to Lebel’s decision to stage Le Desir. The work exhibited work I have produced for this project, Continuous Moment: Le Desir..., uses both Picasso’s original text and Lebel’s production as source material with which to generate images and objects, and the written text explores structural similarities between Picasso and Lebel’s approach to the articulation of a historical continuum through a fragmented ‘collective assemblage’, and my own methodology, which combines references to multiple moments across historical time, using the principles of montage and collage.