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Jean-Yves Jouannais

Encyclopaedia of Wars, exhibition device: How to get a dead grandfather to tell you about wars?
09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Jean-Yves Jouannais
Encyclopédie des guerres, exposure means : Comment se faire raconter les guerres par un grand-père mort (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Vallois, Paris

Jean-Yves Jouannais
Encyclopédie des guerres, exposure means : Comment se faire raconter les guerres par un grand-père mort (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Vallois, Paris

Jean-Yves Jouannais
Encyclopédie des guerres, exposure means : Comment se faire raconter les guerres par un grand-père mort (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Vallois, Paris

Jean-Yves Jouannais
Encyclopédie des guerres, exposure means : Comment se faire raconter les guerres par un grand-père mort (2012)
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Vallois, Paris

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Jean-Yves Jouannais
Encyclopédie des guerres, exposure means : Comment se faire raconter les guerres par un grand-père mort (2012)
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Vallois, Paris

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Born 1964 in France, he lives and works in Paris.  

(The) history (of warfare) is his!

 

Art critic, writer, editor of the journal art press for nine years and co-founder of the journal Perpendiculaire, curator of prestigious exhibitions including L’Histoire de l’Infamie at the 1995 Venice Biennale and The Fool Split in Two. Idiocy in 20th-century Art in Moscow in 2000, Lost in the Supermarket at the Fondation Ricard in 2001 and La Force de l’art 02 at the Grand Palais in April 2009, Jean-Yves Jouannais is also a writer: Artistes sans œuvres - I would prefer not to (Hazan, 1997); Des nains, des jardins, essais sur le kitsch pavillonnaire (Hazan, 1999) and, above all, L'idiotie. Art. vie. politique - méthode (Beaux-arts Magazine Livres, 2003), a book which enjoyed great public success.

 

In the spirit of Robert Filliou and Marcel Broodthaers (two men who both reached a point where they wondered what they might do with their life, and chose art), in 2008 Jean-Yves Jouannais decided to devote the rest of his life to one single project: elaborating an Encyclopaedia of Wars, in alphabetical disorder, made up of constant back and forth movements in human history (up to 1945). Ah, you say, he is too young to have known war! Worse, he never fought! Never mind, knowledge is also a matter of investigation, research and intellectual elaboration. Ever since then, he has been reading only books about war, gradually exchanging the volumes in his library as an art expert for tomes about matters martial, whatever the category, spending his nights with Thucydides, Barbusse and Remarque. He has become a specialist in arms of all calibres, in wars of all kinds, and in battles on every surface. He watches only war films, “thinks war, works war, dreams war and eats war.” In a word, war is his element from dawn to dusk.


“With all due modesty, it’s called L'Encyclopédie des guerres, says Jouannais of his undertaking, who also evokes Littré but also Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert’s immortal encyclopaedist heroes. “It’s a book that is in the process of being written, and that will be written in public, on stage.” The stage, in this instance, is a room at the Pompidou Centre, or elsewhere. And here he comes back to Bouvard and Pécuchet: “Those two seekers of truth engage successively in research into poetry, agronomy, medicine, geology, dietetics and religion, poring over thousands of books and carrying out as many experiments, always ending up with incomprehension, always greeted by failure. Strangely enough, Flaubert’s two autodidacts never immerse themselves in the field of war. […] I wanted to write that missing chapter that was forgotten by Flaubert. From Flaubert’s two copyists I take both their technique and their ridiculous ambition. […] In my approach to this project, as I read and reflect, I collect bits of sentences, terms, images, legends, anecdotes, bringing them together in an unwieldy and undecipherable cabinet of curiosities that naturally takes the form of an encyclopaedia. An impossible ‘Encyclopaedia of Wars,’ from the Iliad to the Second World War. I don’t know why ‘war,” let alone why this war that interests me stops in 1945.”


Well. What was it that came to an end in 1945? Among other things, the life of Jean-Yves Jouannais’ grandfather. In Toulouse, the artist is exhibiting walls of note cards from his L'Encyclopédie des guerres, under the now self-explanatory title: ‘How to get a dead grandfather to tell you about wars.’ There is no need to insist on the fact that this title was inspired by that Joseph Beuys’ performance, “How to explain pictures to a dead hare.” The encyclopaedic tendency combines with pedagogy that is far from minor: the pedagogy of obsessive erudition.