THE (DIS)PLEASURE, RECHERCHES EN ESTHÉTIQUE N°26, JANUARY 2021

par Catherine Dufour

June 29, 2021

Review by Catherine Dufour

The particular spelling of the title of issue 26 of the journal Recherches en esthétique1, Le (dé)plaisir, announces the essentially dialectical dimension of the chosen theme. The refusal to oppose the notions of pleasure and displeasure and the will to analyze their ambivalences, interactions and variations in intensity constitute the guiding line of this issue in the three stated domains: I. (DIS)PLEASURE AESTHETIC, II. (DIS)PLEASURE OF CREATION, III. (DIS)PLEASURE OF RECEPTION. The innumerable philosophical and aesthetic references and reproductions of works, throughout the articles, contribute to a richly substantiated reflection. A chapter is devoted, as in other issues, to the particular meanings of the studied notions in the Caribbean context: IV. (DIS)PLEASURE IN CARIBBEAN AND REUNION. In chapter V. TRIBUTES, Dominique Berthet and Françoise Py celebrate two pioneers of art criticism who passed away in 2020, Aline Dallier, passionate about feminist art, and her husband Frank Popper, theorist of kinetic art, both collaborators of the journal for a period of twenty years. The last article, by Dominique Berthet, is a tribute to the joyful and endearing personality of Marvin Fabien, multimedia artist, adopted Martinican, who died at 42, and to his passion for Bouyon culture, a popular musical current born in Dominica. A reproduction from his vibrant Caribbean bodies appears on the cover of this issue 26. A central booklet offers other beautiful color reproductions of works studied in the course of the journal. The final chapter, VI. READING NOTES, RECENT PUBLICATIONS, offers a rich critical expansion.

(DIS)PLEASURE AESTHETIC

The inaugural interview between Dominique Berthet and Marc Jimenez2 (Malin dé-plaisir!) comments on the semantic nuances of the words pleasure and displeasure, from courtly poetry or seventeenth-century tragedy to the present day, emphasizing how inextricably linked they are. The theories of Freud (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) or Kant (Critique of Judgment) constitute essential stages of this reflection. The article shows that the pleasure/displeasure dialectic only very partially overlaps the distinction between beautiful and ugly and that individual subjectivity is a very relative criterion. The aesthetic preferences of an era are on the other hand very significant, like the recurring transgressions of a kitschized contemporary art submitted to the market. The critical dimension is initiated here...

André-Louis Paré (Aesthetic pleasure and artistic creation) devotes himself to the links between aesthetic emotion and sensitive body, from Platonic eroticism and the hierarchy of pleasures according to Epicurus to Michel Foucault's existential aesthetics and Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics. In Nietzsche, the erotic intoxication inherent in creation far outweighs Kantian rationality.

Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Farewell to aesthetics) mentions the fact that the notion of aesthetic pleasure, too subjective, is hardly taken into account by Heidegger. Adorno's critical theory, of Marxist inspiration, similarly devalues individual pleasure, subjugated to entertainment culture. But Hans Robert Jauss rehabilitates aesthetic jouissance, creative and cognitive and, following Kant, proposes to reconcile aesthetic distance and disinterested pleasure. Barthes, for his part, in The Pleasure of the Text, reconciles bodily experience and the aesthetics of reception.

The current tendency of visual arts is not to minimize the importance of emotions at the foundation of the creative act (Maxime Coulombe, The Pleasure of Images). André-Louis Paré analyzes a series of contemporary works or performances inspired by amorous desire, even pornography.

Christian Ruby (From the pleasure of surprise to the hatred of displeasure. From the relationship to works to the manipulation of the public) recalls that in classical times and in the eighteenth century the (dis)pleasure came from the surprise provoked by mimesis and resulted from the direct contemplation of paintings and sculptures in museums. One could fall into ecstasy before a work, identify with it to the point of alienation, or conversely feel disgust. Confrontation with the judgment of others was indispensable, hence the success of the Salons.

Our era has displaced the question of aesthetic (dis)pleasure resulting from the sensitive encounter, in a precise place, between a subject and a work, towards a debate on the very legitimacy of contemporary art (Art, Yasmina Reza) which never ceases to rethink its supports (the body, the public, the institutions) and its conditions of production. The stake is no longer individual (dis)pleasure but the global evaluation of the artistic system. The American philosopher John Dewey (Art as Experience), by designating art as a fundamental analyzer of our relationship to the world, contributed decisively to this displacement. The search for transgression in works, a possible source of aesthetic pleasure obtained through displeasure, and the censorship that results from it, are an integral part of the questioning.

Jean-Marc Lachaud (Scattered notes on the question of aesthetic (dis)pleasure) wonders if the pleasure felt before a work is one of the criteria of its beauty. The question runs through the centuries, from Plato (Hippias Major) to Jean Lacoste (The Idea of Beauty, 1986).

For a long time, sensual pleasure was judged inferior to intellectual pleasure. Rainer Rochlitz (Art on Trial, 1998) was still recently situated in this perspective, at the antipodes of Baudelaire's passionate criticism or Brecht's aesthetic hedonism. Other authors, nuancing Schaeffer's or Genette's pleasure equals judgment, have adopted the intermediate position of an aesthetics based on the rational value of the work without excluding individual subjectivity (Yves Michaud, Marc Jimenez).

After a long meditation on the aesthetic experience lived at home during the sanitary confinement imposed by Covid19, Jean-Marc Lachaud recalls that it was the eighteenth century that opened the possibility of enjoying art (A. Lontrade), exalted at the end of the nineteenth century by Nietzsche. But the spiritual ambitions of art have not disappeared for all that. For Freud, drives are sublimated by art, which has a civilizing vocation. For Adorno, the injunction to aesthetic pleasure is an avatar of mercantile ideology. For Marcuse, in Reich's wake, aesthetic pleasure and erotic pleasure have common roots, envisaged before him by André Breton or Walter Benjamin.

Nathalie Heinich analyzes the negative feelings engendered by contemporary art. But Carole Tagon-Hugon specifies that pleasure and disgust often go hand in hand and that ugliness or violence have always existed in works of art, transcended by form.

The question addressed by Bruno Péquignot (Deferred pleasure...) is that of aesthetic hermeticism (Mallarmé), a possible source of displeasure. But is spontaneous, immediate pleasure the most conducive to properly judging a work? Is it not a concession to a conformist horizon of expectation? A reading worthy of the name must be active, engaged, creative.

Pierre Macherey considers that pleasure, not necessary, occurs in addition. Access to truth, according to Nietzsche, passes through a demystifying disillusionment and, according to Max Weber, through a disenchantment of the world. Accessing a work through effort produces superior satisfaction, called jouissance by Lacan. Milan Kundera names kitsch (The Art of the Novel, 1986) everything that goes in the direction of the culture of a moment. Godard opposes art that disturbs and culture that reassures. Confronting a hermetic work (Jeanne Dielman by Chantal Ackerman) supposes an initiatory displeasure.

Mallarmé's elitism is finally put into perspective by the author, who concludes, with Marx, that the vocation of authentic art is to form a public capable of understanding it.

To tear us away from some received ideas about Kant's supposed absolute intellectualism in matters of aesthetic judgment, Michel Guérin (Urgency and patience of living or the origin of disinterestedness) invites us to a very learned meditation on a few lines from the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment.

By focusing, when speaking of Kant, on the idea of an aesthetic pleasure that would only be pleasure of contemplation, one omits the pleasure of learning to which it is mixed. Let us therefore cease to think of Kant in terms of receptive passivity in favor of a recognition of the subject's agency in this mixture of pleasure and knowing.

Beauty in Kant cannot be conceived without a part of individual emotion. It speaks to the double nature of the human being, a reasonable animal who is neither beast nor pure spirit. Aesthetic feeling is a work on oneself of the author and the receiver, which combines a form of pleasure with a process of reflection. Like thought, it is rooted in an amorphous affect, refined and sublimated by distancing. Intellectual and sensual pleasures cannot be absolutely differentiated.

In a festival of definitions and nuances, from Epicurus to Nietzsche, Dominique Berthet (Aesthetic experience, pleasure and displeasure) explores the different registers of (dis)pleasure up to the decisive one of encounter, this tipping point that amazes or terrifies. From surprise to total availability of being, André Breton drew a philosophy of life, testified by Nadja or L'Amour fou.

For René Passeron (The Pictorial Work, 1980) creation is action, it is a poietic, which involves the artist, body included, between torments and ecstasy. On the receiver's side, the mission of art has long been to please, by virtue of imposed norms (Aristotle, classical harmony). For Kant, the beautiful, rational and devoted to the universal, is distinguished from the agreeable, which only addresses the senses, and depends on everyone's tastes.

But for Baudelaire, the beautiful is always bizarre. It proceeds from a shock, a gap, a contact with the unusual. The moderns will dig this furrow, calling into question the norms of representation, mimesis and the concern to please. The avant-gardes pushed logic to the extreme, especially Dadaism. Scandal is today a guarantee of notoriety (Paul McCarthy's giant sextoy) or of awareness of state violence (Chen Chieh-Jen's digital photos representing unbearable tortures).

The beautiful is relative, subjective, ideological. Works that displeased in their time have reached summits of recognition afterwards. The cultural factor plays an essential role in aesthetic appreciation (Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows). Many artists work with waste or rejects.

Aesthetic (dis)pleasure is not necessarily in contradiction with the exercise of rational judgment that Hegel demanded. Diderot, Baudelaire, Breton proved it through their writings. Any emotionally overwhelming work also gives food for thought.

Christophe Génin (The aesthetics of reversible polarities) emphasizes, thanks to Plato's Gorgias in particular, that pleasure and displeasure are not antagonistic. The unbearable urban din was transformed into musical writing by Pierre Henry (Mass for the Present Time, 1967). Pictorial violence, gore cinema or grand-guignol can provide pleasure.

Hegel's Aesthetics demonstrates that it is vain to oppose comedy and tragedy. Both are structurally similar and the spectator's pleasure is the same, oriented in opposite directions.

Christophe Genin amuses himself by comparing, in the light of Kantian aesthetics, the experiences of a Rameau amateur and a rap fan, whom everything at first sight divides. But who is the barbarian of whom? Can a "pure taste," a disinterested and universal pleasure really exist? Doesn't the history of music prove that the reception of a work is historically and socially determined? The rapper behaves like a hateful barbarian, but can we expect anything else from an oppressed community? And isn't the Rameau amateur the barbarian of bourgeois contemplation, so little universal? This quarrel has run through the entire history of art, from biblical times to westerns, from the despised music of Black Americans to internationally adored rock'n'roll culture.

Comparing three recent interpretations of the "Sauvages" air in Les Indes galantes, Christophe Genin praises insistently that of the Cappella Mediterranea (Opéra Bastille, 2019) which, having integrated krump and urban creolities into its multimedia device, succeeds, without betraying Rameau, in subverting Kantian categories, in favor of a mixed universality and an otherness of taste emancipated from received ideas.

(DIS)PLEASURE OF CREATION

Richard Conte's workshop notes (Rinsing the Eye. A Poietic Divagation), taken during the two months of sanitary confinement in 2020, accompanied a pictorial wandering of a poietic nature (Valéry, Passeron), conducted on a bundle of cotton pulp paper of 180 pages, from the themes pleasure/displeasure.

Rinsing the eye, that's the first sentence, February 7. A reverie begins on painting as clearing of the blank canvas (Deleuze, Logic of Sensation). Each page is purification of the gaze and recommencement of the world. This pleasure alternates with the tragic feeling of painting as bandage of the ontological void that inhabits us (Passeron).

Over the days the artist meditates on the texture of the pages, their possibilities, the associated feelings. Animal eyes populate his paintings. Compulsive pleasure of divagation on the pages. Massage of paper by paint. Eroticism of hands caressing the bundle.

The reader is invited to take note of the techniques, tools, substances enlisted in creation. But also of the erasures, accidents of paper, motifs that arise from random drips. The bundle is a Bachelardian reverie, encouraged by pareidolias that authorize all regressions towards childhood and embryogenesis.

Turn the page. Open up to the unknown, to the marvelous. Animal figures are a revelation, in the photographic sense of the word. The pangolin and the bat threaten us with epidemic, punishment of our fundamental animality.

Take it easy. Follow the curve of desire to arrive at pleasure. Let the imaginal process do (Henry Corbin).

Absence of text. Pleasure of infinite leafing, of backwards leafing, to go back in time, against Western tradition. Impossibility of tearing out imperfect pages, at the risk of seeing the bundle collapse. The latter, which opens to 360°, is a living temporal continuum, traversed by the invisible, which transcends confinement. Furtive ghosts populate imaginary mythologies and museums, personal and collective.

The bundle is also routine, obsessive pastime, experimental or lazy, addiction. Neither trial notebooks, nor outlet, it's a mode of existence (Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence, 2009). It's a work in the making, source of a constantly renewed pleasure.

Élisabeth Amblard (Pleasure and torment: clay in the hands of artists) meditates on the sensuality of clay gestures, from the very ancient Female Figurine of Halaf, symbol of triumphant fertility. Matter is not mute and responds by generating a moving form (Tim Ingold). Clay both resists (Bachelard) and submits with benevolence. Rodin's gestures, the prestidigitator, brush, caress or violate the clay, engender living bodies (Paul Gsell). The attention of the hand and that of the eye combine (Gérard Traquandi). The demiurge's pleasure is Dionysian.

The nature of clay is a viscosity of earth and water mixed, an ideal state of matter (Bachelard).

Penone relives the primitive plastic experience of finger squeezing (Earth, 2015). Kneading is work, in the etymological sense of torment. Bachelard speaks of kneading cogito. Orozco reveals its physical and mystical dynamic in Mis manos son mi corazón 1991. Morphogenesis (Bachelard, Tim Ingold) is a meeting of forces and materials. More than form, what counts is life in becoming.

Soffio 6 (Penone, 1978), a kind of life-size terracotta amphora, bears the hollow imprint of the artist's body. Support and abandonment to matter, embrace, suffocation, mortifying incorporation. Fontana in 1950 pierces a clay plaque with aggressive cuts and holes, which seem to go back to the highest Antiquity.

But this aggression of a matter that submits, definitively fixed by firing in the kiln, is also jubilatory. The work of earth, although violent and regressive, deploys a thousand reveries. It is primordial jouissance rooted in archaic vitality. Clay is a malleable medium, psychoanalytic symbol of fusion and disengagement. The loss of limits is restored by form, in a resilient act of love or hatred.

By its capacity for ductility, resistance and abandonment, imprint and embrace, earth is a mirror matter of the body.

Nature, bodies, color, light are, according to Hélène Sirven, the main ingredients of Cézanne's painting. (Search for pleasure, the artist's work and its surroundings. Cézanne's lesson). The artist's work is often laborious, even painful, but all the nuances of the word pleasure are present in his remarks on the creative process (Ambroise Vollard, Conversations with Cézanne, 1899). Pleasure of sharing with his wife the happiness of a finished work, of contemplating nature at length to make the divine sensation spring from it. Wonder of seeing and return to the mystagogical sources of art. Aesthetic pleasure, well beyond mimesis, is a poetic feeling that envelops the entire being.

The pleasure of creation is also the pleasure of getting closer to the masters (Veronese, Rembrandt, Holbein, Pissarro, Monet), of discussing with Émile Bernard, the friend, critic and support in the face of misunderstandings. Jouissance of giving body to inner visions. Sensory desire for fullness, close to Matisse. Pleasure situated between invention and imitation (Maurice Denis). Pleasure of restoring the ephemeral, the transitory, the archaic mysteries of places and spaces. Pleasure of feeling all the arts vibrate together, music, literature, painting.

Cézanne's pantheism brings him closer to Rodin. Like Gauguin he savors the words of friends against isolation. Like Matisse he tastes the happiness of taking risks in creation, of letting go, of contemplating the finished work, of stripping down and love at the root of all creation. Anticipation of the viewer's pleasure, carnal and spiritual at the same time. Pleasure of giving form, like Giacometti, to naked reality.

According to Jean-Pierre Changeux (Reason and Pleasure, 1994) aesthetic emotion reconciles pleasure and reason, involving the subject's personal memory, his experiences, his knowledge and his unconscious cultural imprints. Art tends towards the maximum of being (Michaux).

(DIS)PLEASURE OF RECEPTION Dominique Chateau was interested in three immersive devices (The (dis-)pleasure in immersive situation (Christian Boltanski, Pascale Marthine Tayou and Sam Mendes) produced in 2019-2020.

Bringing together Boltanski's exhibition entitled Faire son temps (Centre Pompidou, Paris) and that of the Cameroonian Pascale Marthine Tayou, Black Forrest (Fondation Clément, Martinique), Dominique Chateau questions the ambiguity felt by the visitor (Baumgarten's confused clarity). Aesthetic pleasure mingles with the pain caused by the memory of the Shoah and colonial trauma. Here the author summons Burke (Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757), his refusal to oppose pleasure and pain and his analysis of their interdependence. After the visit, something anguishing continues to haunt the memory, maintained by the intensity of aesthetic pleasure. The spectator is confronted with an artialization (Alain Roger), that is to say a transformation into art of something that is not of its domain. This artialization is itself at the origin of an aestheticization (Walter Benjamin), that is to say a transfer into the domain of values (beauty) of something that is the opposite of these values (violence). Hence the malaise...

Sam Mendes' film (1917, 2019), which deals with the trauma of trench warfare, is an immobile immersion experience. Reproductions of timed screen captures allow us to perceive the precision of cinematographic work. All the techniques used lead to a drastic blurring of the threshold between the world of the image and the real world. Dominique Chateau, in Pierce's line, nevertheless considers them as icons, at a distance from the real while producing a reality effect. The immersive effect does not cancel the iconic effect, contrary to what Andrea Pinotti claims. It increases it on the contrary, producing this paradoxical hallucination commented on by Freud, Metz, or Souriau.

From hypnotic trouble emerges a physical and psychic displeasure. Sometimes there is conflict between referential horror and pleasure of the device (choreographed massacres in certain Asian films or in Tarantino). But an immersion, even if hypnotic and hallucinatory, never totally abolishes the spectator's consciousness of filming and editing performances. This is part of the pleasure and/or malaise felt...

Dufy is pleasure, wrote Gertrude Stein in 1946. The artist rejoiced in his practice of the profession of plastic artist and decorative artist, in his mastery of multiple know-how: drawing, oil, watercolor, engraving, ceramics, tapestry. Gisèle Grammare (At your pleasure Monsieur Dufy!) retained four major themes from the Raoul Dufy retrospective, pleasure at the MAM (Paris, 2008).

The Festival or Pleasure Paintings often represent Le Havre in the nineteenth century, its promenades, towards Sainte-Adresse, its pier, its regattas, its festivals. The Flagged Street is declined in eleven versions.

The Bathers theme is prolific, influenced at the beginning by Cézanne and by cubism, in canvases that know variations, of style, colors, décors, motifs, impregnated with amazed childhood memories and playful spirit.

The Ateliers series relies on blues of different shades, up to dark ultramarine, but also on the pink of models, windows open to the sea, paintings within the painting, festive and colorful.

The fourth theme, Music, embodies fantasy in painting. Orchestra representations multiply in several versions with sought-after tones: bluish piano, pink-orange and red ocher score, floral décor from yellow to cold green. All of Dufy's violins are red, sometimes contrasting with the white light of the scores. Would red be the color of pleasure? The painter's lively, enthusiastic gesture is visible in the fluid tracings and rapid brushing.

Éric Valentin does not hide his trouble, even his displeasure before the manifestations of unconditional admiration aroused by Anselm Kiefer (Anselm Kiefer: a critical evaluation). In the 1970s and 1980s, the subjects chosen by the painter embodied a return to order, against German and American neo-avant-gardes. His painting is nationalist and, moreover, his representations of ruins of Nazi architectures do not always distinguish themselves from Nazi art, while claiming to criticize it.

From the 1980s onwards, Kiefer's Germanic mythology takes a back seat to let Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah speak. His work cites Paul Celan's poetry and the Shoah (Poppy and Memory-The Angel of History, 1989). Neoclassical monumentality gives way to desublimated ruins, under the inspiration of Ingeborg Bachmann.

To better understand Kiefer's intentions, Éric Valentin compares his pictorial interpretations of Louria's mystical theology with those of Barnett Newman. The latter drew from it a messianic, luminous, abstract dimension, coupled with an optimistic, human and political vision of art. While Kiefer offers toxic and deadly lead drips as divine emanation (Emanation, 2000) and figurative symbols of the original catastrophe (the breaking of the vessels) that haunts him (see his lead library, Chevirat Ha-Kelim, 2000).

Kiefer's syncretic spirituality (Rosicrucianism, Buddhism), sometimes confused, fits into the tradition of a speculative and irrational German philosophical romanticism that will culminate in Rudolf Steiner's theosophy – inspiring Mondrian, Kandinsky or Beuys.

For Kiefer, art is essentially religious, but rarely ethical. He is mainly interested in cosmogonies. His fundamental references are Novalis and Friedrich. The question of origins is capital there. Art is occult, discourse on art powerless. His philosophical references are dated: Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault are absent. Art is an absolute, held at a distance from interpretations. This conception is mystifying and not subversive as he claims: the artist has no vocation to change life or society. Art and life must be dissociated, contrary to the avant-garde claim. His anti-Marxism is flagrant. This is why he rejected Documenta 10 1998 and 11 2002, very political, globalist and aesthetically engaged (Hirschhorn). He is interested in myth, not current events. He is on the side of Aaron's confusionism, the ineffable, the incommunicable, the occult, the reigning form, the figurative divine, against Moses, law, concept, morality. Myths are in him at the service of individual imagination and senses, not of the unveiling of truth. The title of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Art will survive its ruins, implicitly glorifies his work, against the backdrop of the decline of avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes...

Hugues Henri situates the Theater of Orgies and Mysteries of the Viennese actionists (Pleasure and displeasure among the Viennese actionists!) between pagan bacchanals, catharsis of ancient theater, new purifying eucharist and extreme performance involving the public. Cultivating blasphemy and violence, this radical device used blood, sex and excrement to excess. Provoking extreme pleasure or displeasure aimed to denounce the repression of individuals by society and powers. Freud's psychoanalysis, then that of Reich, and his theory of orgone, directly influenced the actionists. In the line of Jackson Pollock's Action Painting, they mistreated works, even self-mutilated (Günter Brus, Resistance Test, 1970).

After 1971, Otto Mühl's paroxysmal orientations lead to the AAO's communitarian experience, with totalitarian overtones, supported by Reich's Sexual Revolution and his rejection of the patriarchal family as the origin of neuroses. His therapy of emotional regression, intended to allow a rebirth (Aktionsanalyse), combined Reich's theories with those of Gestalt therapy, Bioenergy and Primal Scream. In the 1990s, Mühl was sentenced to prison for autocratic, sectarian drifts, and diversion of minors.

The Viennese actionist movement has affinities with the antipsychiatric current, with Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, with the Sensory Propositions of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. It has had many heirs in Europe (Orlan and her surgical metamorphoses), in the United States (Paul McCarthy / Bob Flanagan staging his illness in Sick, 1991) and among non-Western artists (the Cuban-American Ana Mendieta or the Brazilian Adriana Varejão).

Laurette Célestine (The expression of displeasure through cliparts and various illustrations) intertwines highly scientific considerations (Freud, Paul Eckman) and lexicological ones, concerning the emotional manifestations of (dis)pleasure, with a meticulous analysis of cliparts, these small digital images, emoticons (emojis) or miniature characters integrated into computer documents. Classified and scrutinized meticulously from their movements of mouths, eyes or eyebrows, their color variations, their gestures, these images nevertheless leave doubts about the interpretations to give them...

It finally appears that the two great approaches to knowledge of the subject, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, converge on several points. The latter (Pierre Magistretti, François Ansermet) have confirmed the fundamental cerebral interaction of the pleasure/displeasure binomial. The pleasure circuit (linked to dopamine) is a reaction to a previous displeasure situation and cannot function without this preexistence (Ansermet). What Civilization and Its Discontents confirms in part...

But this conception is strictly Western. For Buddhists, suffering is not to be fled, nor sought, but to be accepted as a constitutive principle of life. Pleasure and displeasure can be experienced on the neuronal plane with the same serenity, thanks to an adapted asceticism.

(DIS)PLEASURE IN CARIBBEAN AND REUNION

Christelle Lozère devotes a study (Places of pleasure and debauchery in the colonial iconography of the colonial and French Antilles) to the erotic and pornographic iconography which, in Europe, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, accounted for the practices of the colonial world and the mistreatment of the black body.

The detailed analysis of a caricature of a brothel keeper, by Thomas Rowlandson at the end of the eighteenth century, highlights the depravity of bodies as a symptom of trafficking. A current of English satire developed at the same time, which mocked rich slave owners. But abolitionist caricature often masks a perverse content likely to please lovers of pornographic images... In the French Antilles, the dangers that threaten white women unleash anti-abolitionist propaganda instead. (Masson, Nocturnal Scene in the Antilles, 1855).

After 1830, engravings cultivate a picturesque representation of tropical nature, masking racial violence. The genre scene, nourished by social realism after 1848, represents the rural petty people and city dwellers in postcolonial regimes erected as models.

But this neocolonial modernism accommodates perfectly with miserabilist descriptions and complacent eroticism (A Night of Orgy in Saint-Pierre de la Martinique, novel, 1892). Orientalist erotic representations of the Antillean woman by European painters (Fulconis, Gauguin) spread, as well as the iconography of interracial immorality (José Simont). Gustave Alaux's gallant scenes in the 1930s (Dance on a Martinican beach), inspired by the eighteenth century, offer an idyllic vision of slave society in the French Antilles.

Parallel to this, images of black sensuality from cabarets and music halls spread in interwar Paris, conveyed by magazines (Frou-frou, Le Gai-Paris) and high-circulation magazines (Voilà, Vu). But the exotic smile, at the time of the colonial exhibition 1931, struggles to conceal the most racist clichés, also decipherable in the images of pretty Creoles in traditional costume offered by island artists. The illustrations of Charles Royer's novel Vaudou still draw, in 1944, from the domination fantasies of Western white patriarchy...

Scarlett Jésus notes (Trouble(s) facing the black man's body) that Christian colonization has cast opprobrium on innocent nudity. This situation is exacerbated in the Caribbean by American Protestant churches and the proximity of Jamaica, where homosexuality is still punished with prison today. But the voodoo pantheon, like the Quattrocento which had traded the medieval vision of Saint Sebastian's torture for an androgynous representation of rapture, has integrated Saint Sebastian into a mythology open to gender. Erzulie Dantor is protector of queers, gays and trans...

The Haitian artist Maksaens Denis realizes in 2014 a series of eleven digital photomontages of Saint Sebastian, which composes with traditional iconography, the sacred, homosexuality, obscenity, in varied stagings of the desire/disgust couple likely to exorcise the fear of the other in oneself (Daniel Welzer-Lang). Drawing from Western culture, the Haitian saint at the same time turns away from it, as an emblematic martyr of intolerance. The video Tropical Tragedy also handles the racist, and sadomasochistic, fantasy of the hyper-sexualized black body, but also says, in multimedia version, the rejection of ancestral recognition of genders in favor of a normative, conquering and homophobic Western heterosexuality.

In the same spirit, Barbara Prézeau-Stephenson represents naked sleeping men, beyond genders, not very virile (Exoticism, 1998). The Réunionnais Abel Techer, born at the time of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, aggressively remodels his virility to exhibit a vulnerable body before the norm. The young Guadeloupean, Audrey Phibel realizes performances inscribed in the universe of drag queens.

After reviewing the great political and sexual ruptures proper to the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, Christian Bracy (Derision, (dis)pleasure, division) devotes himself to three Guadeloupean artists with significant expressive dissonances.

Chantaléa Commin is pictorial revolt (À corps perdu, aesthetics of the decayed body, 2017) in the face of decay and death, meditation on a painful past and on the destructive transformations imposed on Guadeloupe by the globalized economy. Her bodies engulfed in whirlpools remember the drowned bodies of ancestors. Her Ipomoea-Pès Caprae 1 and 2 2019 deplore the coastal desanding of a literally liquidated country. The installation Jardin créole nouveau 2019 makes death hover in a saddened space and opposes our consumerist lives to those of self-sufficient, economical and generous Guadeloupean small farmers.

Stan Musquer situates his Adam & Eve chased from the Western paradise 2019 in a small enclosed garden, sinister, overlooked by a Saint-Michael in the colors of death.

François Piquet reuses in his human or animal sculptures – Bèf chapé lizin 2007, La Dette and Devoir de mémoire 2008 – the braiding of steel bands that encircled rum barrels. The result impresses with its allusions to slave violence and identity dispossession. Fuckrace 2019, a series of Chinese ink drawings, scanned, digitized then printed, tells revolt through black humor and satire.

The article closes with a bitter questioning of the evaluation made of works of art by institutions, art critics and commercial circuits whose choices often remain obscure. The gap between Guadeloupean and international realities adds complexity to these situations...

Claude Cauquil is an artist born in France, where he studied art, and settled in Martinique since 2001. Sophie Ravion d'Ingianni questions him in his studio (My job...to give to see), a total living space.

His approach to color was inspired by the discovery of American abstract painters (Rothko, Jasper Johns). Cauquil repaints on his paintings or throws them away when necessary. Displeasure comes from the difficulty of being satisfied. To the initial intuition often succeeds the unexpected, chance, the unforeseen accident, which must be exploited. A moment's pleasure can be followed by great displeasure...

His greatest happiness is that of groping, from preselected visuals. From time spent and experience emerges an ease of gesture, a feeling of freedom in relation to the model. Well done or badly done, it doesn't matter.

The realization of series on civil rights in the United States (King's Dream) changed his life and transformed his view of the world. True pleasure is in this upheaval.

This series then gave rise to installations: pleasure of spatial arrangement, of encounter between works and a public, but also fear of crowds, of contacts.

To the primary pleasure of making portraits is mixed the anguish of capturing gazes, of tipping towards a beyond the mirror of being, of discovering the flaw proper to the human.

Cauquil says he ignores the pleasure of transgression but savors that of refusing concessions. The realization of urban frescoes and sculptures, commissions accepted to appease his material worries, give him the pleasure of allowing those who neither frequent museums nor galleries to reappropriate a daily life embellished by art. Despite the inconveniences linked to in situ work in abandoned places, often ungrateful and aggressive, he appreciates the raw pleasure of this human, living experience, less solitary than that of the studio.

Dominique Berthet interviews Stan Musquer (Abolition of new colonial slavery. Anatomies of a Guadeloupean culture), an artist born in France and living in Guadeloupe since his adolescence, author of numerous détournements of Western representations of Genesis. Adam and Eve chased from the Western paradise or Colonization tells the destructive role of Catholicism on island peoples. Questioned on the reasons for this appropriation, Stan Musquer goes back to his schooling as a white child in a class of black students, and to the obsessive presence of Western representations of Genesis. From post-assimilationist ambiguity, the painter drew an obsession: the right for two cultures, often antagonistic, not to remain locked in their History. The mixed character of Guadeloupean reality must impose itself in creation against any form of exclusion.

A series of his paintings represents Guadeloupeans without faces, enigmatic presences reduced to simple silhouettes and a first name (Joël, 2019). Other characters from his Anatomies of culture are painted with emblematic accessories of double culture (the costume, the "Grena," famous Antillean moped). Fanciful texts rhythm his paintings, improvised word-poems or drawn from Hector Poullet's Le créole sans peine.

The series devoted to human anatomy, since 2014, often makes people uncomfortable. The members of flayed bodies covered in black (Parcels of black skin on white skin, 2014-2019) testify cruelly to the racial question.

Stan Musquer explains at length that the emotion engaged in his painter's activity is not devoid of displeasure. But his greatest pleasure is to enrich his artistic canonizations of Guadeloupean society, in paintings bordered with illuminations similar to those of missals.

CONCLUSION

This last contribution by Dominique Berthet on (dis)pleasure according to Stan Musquer, in the Guadeloupean context, highlights, like the articles by Scarlett Jésus, Christian Bracy or Sophie Ravion d'Ingianni, that memorial suffering and creative jouissance are closely intertwined. Caribbean creation is inscribed in the register of reparative pleasure, thanks to the profusion of mediums, to celebrate a history riddled with pain. Don't the dancing, frenzied and provocative bodies of Marvin Fabien express a revenge on the ancestral domination of the black body studied by Christelle Lozère? The whole of chapter IV, devoted to the Caribbean, grants a particular depth to the exposés of chapters I, II and III on the theme of (dis)pleasure as a determining notion of Western artistic theories and practices. The aesthetic experience which, etymologically, relates to the sensitive, sensations, and emotions (aesthesis) feeds, since Antiquity, a complex thought, of which the present journal offers us a very documented panorama, extended to the contemporary and to an enlarged geocultural space.

1Journal of the Center for Studies and Research in Aesthetics and Plastic Arts (CEREAP), published in Martinique since 1995 and directed by Dominique Berthet, art critic, professor at the University of the Antilles and Guyana and associate researcher at the Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics of the University of Paris 1.

2 Marc Jimenez, very old collaborator of the journal and author of several works on contemporary art, is professor of Aesthetics at the University of Paris 1 and director of the Center for Research in Aesthetics.