Recherches en Esthétique is the journal of the Center for Studies and Research in Aesthetics and Plastic Arts (CEREAP), directed by Professor Dominique Berthet 1. Published in Martinique since 1995, it brings together around a single theme numerous articles produced by artists or theorists in the field of plastic arts, aesthetics, literature, performing arts, photography, cinema, etc. Each issue devotes an important place to contemporary artists, particularly from the Caribbean, which gives it a particular interest. This issue 25, published in January 2020, in A4 format, has 272 richly illustrated pages in black and white and a booklet of color reproductions. The 37 pages of substantial reading notes that complete the articles deal with recent works related to the questions addressed, particularly on cinema.

The journal includes six sections. The first is a theoretical overview of collage, montage and assemblage practices. The second considers the specific case of montage in Soviet cinema and Hitchcock. The third addresses domains as unexpected as pastry, Congolese "sape," sampling, struggles and dances from Senegal and Brazil. The fourth and fifth deepen the universes of some artists from Senegal, France and Quebec (IV), then from Martinique, Guadeloupe and Cuba (V). The last is finally a panorama of the 13th Havana Biennial 2019, accompanied by an in-depth study of two exhibiting artists.

COLLAGE, MONTAGE, ASSEMBLAGE

After his presentation editorial, Dominique Berthet interviews Marc Jimenez 2 ("Hieroglyphs of the Future"), who judges it necessary to question montage and assemblage in the context of contemporary creation and globalization. This interview testifies to a will to decentering of artistic practices long considered as exclusive to European modernity. Giving a prominent place to today's Caribbean and a "decolonial" political approach to creation, the journal, while following in the wake of European avant-garde ideals, has the vocation to reinterpret or contest them.

This interview poses several questions, of definition first: how do montage and assemblage distinguish themselves? what do they have in common with collage? "Montage" is an ordinary term in the field of cinema which, through cutting and recomposition, always produces a finished form, even if placed under the sign of heterogeneity. "Assemblage" designates the process of implementing montage and supposes a questioning of the real and classical harmony.

Berthet and Jimenez are inevitably led to address the great controversies of aesthetic philosophy aroused by the practice of montage, culminating in the Marxist sphere of the late 1930s. The title of the interview, "Hieroglyphs of the Future," is a tribute to Ernst Bloch, brilliant precursor of an artistic contemporaneity that could only be thought in terms of fragments and dislocations. But Bloch was vigorously contested by Lukács, champion of a "realism" supported by the Hegelian idea of totality and hostile to the "montages" of avant-gardes, judged "decadent." For Walter Benjamin on the contrary, the avant-garde work, born of a modernity in crisis, could only be divided. In this he was close to Adorno, who subscribed, like Bloch, to the principle of a work envisaged as "reconfiguration of scattered fragments." But neither Benjamin nor Adorno shared Bloch's idealism and his belief in a utopian function of montage, a process they rather attached to a conception of history as catastrophe...

Berthet and Jimenez recall that assemblage developed especially in the second half of the 20th century, as evidenced by the exhibition The Art of Assemblage (MoMA, 1961) which Marc Jimenez does not hesitate to qualify as the origin of "contemporary" art. The fragment, the discontinuous, the chaos impose themselves, in the wake of the Dada-surrealists (Ernst, Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Man Ray), relayed by the walls of May 68, the détournements of the situationists, then of designers, plastic artists, advertisers and digital artists. Collages and assemblages are still very alive today: see Orlan's skin grafts, Xiao Yu's terrifying Ruan (a transgenic assemblage in formaldehyde), JR's photographic collages against migration policies, Pascal Boyart's fresco, La Liberté guidant le peuple 2019, in solidarity with the "yellow vests."

Jean-Marc Lachaud ("Collages, montages, assemblages... Towards an aesthetics of non-coherence!") recalls that the cubists, futurists, dadaists, all practiced collage from the 1910s, and comments in turn on the decisive exhibition of 1961. The word "assemblage" at this time takes precedence over the word collage, to make emerge the diversity of processes and materials used. The approach is often demiurgic: it is a question of tearing from the world pieces of reality, of cutting into the existing, of digging into the entrails of the real to imagine a different world, oneiric, surrealist, fantasmatic, inscribed in a deliberate will not to dissociate art and life thanks to the numerous materials (including the living) and trades solicited. Assemblage becomes the new way of creating, which replaces painting and sculpture. Very concrete, it contradicts the abstract purity advocated by Clement Greenberg. New objects are invented to "passion the world," like the surrealist objects of yesteryear, but, born of consumer society, they cannot omit an essential component: waste, already used by Schwitters. Non-coherence is not incoherence, it is a new coherence between balance and imbalance, in which the viewer has a role to play.

To deepen the processes of montage and assemblage, which deny mimesis and the classical aesthetics of representation, Dominique Berthet ("Montage and assemblage: an aesthetics of shock") gives a place of choice to Soviet avant-garde filmmakers, thanks to whom montage deserved the status of "concept" (cf. Dominique Chateau, Contribution to the History of the Concept of Montage. Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Vertov and Eisenstein, 2019). Refusing to copy the world to be able to recreate it, montage disjoins what is joined and conversely, produces unexpected gaps and rhythms between fragments, which characterizes the avant-garde work. Different from random collage, montage is revolutionary because it produces "augmented realities" worthy of the great political upheavals of its time.

Berthet returns to the quarrels between thinkers of the Marxist sphere. For Lukács, montage is incapable of questioning capitalism and of accounting dialectically for social power relations and objective reality. For Brecht on the contrary, the shaking of the social function of art by montage and its faculty of "cleaning" of realism prepare the Revolution. For Adorno there is no revolutionary aesthetics without rejection of an illusory meaning – which would result from the background/form relationship – in favor of a meaning restored by a dislocated form, resisting an alienated real.

Berthet envisages the different facets of the fragment. Synonym of lack, of incompletion, it is however endowed with its own energy. The transgressive force of montage, revealed in the 20th century, reaches in the 21st an unprecedented extension thanks to genetics, robotics or computer science...

For Christian Ruby ("Montage on both sides") it is the very notion of "public" which, quite unexpectedly, is the result of a "montage process," which the author endeavors to observe "the splendors and miseries" throughout History, according to dominant representations or the legitimization needs of institutions. The public is neither an essence nor a unified form.

At the same time as art seeks to expose itself, the public becomes in the 17th century the barometer of the reception of the work, in dedicated places (theater, opera), reserved for specific communities.

The elites sometimes feel self-sufficient in matters of aesthetics, sometimes on the contrary they define themselves in relation to a public judged, according to the cases, active and educable, or contemptible and passive. The utopias of Schiller or Kant attempted a third way, that of a public capable of regulating its internal contradictions.

Recent sociological approaches unfortunately reestablish essentialist criteria: the public is good or bad (the "general public"). But one cannot subscribe to such a negation of an attested "public-montage," closer to us, by the provocations of the avant-gardes (Mayakovsky's "slap in the face of public taste"). The recognition of the "non-public" (the mass that does not have access to culture) in the Villeurbanne manifesto 1968 was an important stage of the process. The "contemporary art quarrel," street arts, immersive live performance confirm the existence of heterogeneous forces that traverse a "public" in tension with Art, at the opposite of the Kantian ideal of universality of taste.

Artist having lived between France and Martinique, Sentier ("The tragic in assemblage") defines assemblage from the concept of apeiron by which Anaximander designated the formless, the original principle of all things, the indefinite, the unlimited, closely linked to the One, obsession of Antiquity and underground axis of assemblage, stable in appearance but unstable by essence. Its spatio-temporal indetermination opens to all the possibles of a Real constantly threatened. It opposes traditional art which claimed to freeze the antagonistic forces inherent in creation (Gilbert Simondon), to contain them thanks to the frame of the painting, to sculpture in the round, to the precision of the base or to drawing under glass. The assemblage can collapse at any moment, by withdrawal of one of its fragments linked to the chaotic chance of the universe. It is not surprising that the Dadaists and surrealists practiced it, at a time when scientific and philosophical values and certainties, correlated to the monstrosities of History, were wavering. Lévi-Strauss's "bricolage" in The Savage Mind is also an incarnation of it.

Sentier notes that the assemblages of numerous artists (Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Tomas Hirschhorn, etc.) are politically engaged and testify to an anti-colonial sensitivity. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt valorize the collective and the multitude, in adequacy with the practice of assemblage. Assemblage refuses to complete, that is to say to kill. It condemns the superiority of the whole over the part. Lack, the lacunary are valorized there. It speaks of the intolerable and the "logic of the worst" (Clément Rosset) against all false harmonies.

MONTAGE AND ASSEMBLAGE IN CINEMA

If the practice of montage by Russian avant-garde filmmakers is of incomparable richness, it is because it has attempted to nourish itself with theory. Dominique Chateau's article ("Montage: a Leninist concept") is a back and forth between Lenin's writings, reader of Hegel, Marx and Engels, and the positions taken by Soviet filmmakers. Eisenstein's quasi-"gestaltist" montage owes much to Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, advocating the clash between fragments that take on meaning through their placement in a sequence. Dziga Vertov's Kinoglaz (Cine-Eye) proposes a rereading of the world thanks to "intervals," these gaps between two successive images in the same shot, obliging the spectator to "dialectical jumps" revealing the gap between reality and representation.

Despite their disagreements, Eisenstein and Vertov both accord primordial importance to the dynamism of images and movement, through fidelity to a Hegelianism that considered becoming and transformation as the essential processes of the Real. Their conception of "movement" was not reduced to the "rhythm" of the moving image of early 20th century American cinema (Edwin S. Porter), but sought a "dialectical overcoming" through montage.

Aspiring to a revolutionary cinema, Russian filmmakers did not pledge allegiance to socialist realism. Eisenstein was partisan of a singular "authority" – Strike was art – and Vertov was hostile to any sterilizing vulgate. Both found in Leninist writings a theoretical foundation for their practice, and the dialectical arguments of a resistance to an ideology that was becoming totalitarian.

Bruno Péquignot's article ("Montage / assemblage: dialectic vs mechanical") extends the previous one by deepening Dominique Chateau's theories. The distinction between "montage" and "assemblage" fits perfectly with that which Marx makes between classical materialism and dialectical materialism. Transposed into the universe of cinema, the binary and mechanical oppositions of classical materialism would be on the side of an "assemblage" reduced to a simple collage in a narrative continuity. But Eisenstein's "montage" seeks a "qualitative leap," analogous to the Hegelian-Marxist transformation of quantity into quality and apt to disorganize ordinary logic, to dialectize it by the power of shock, in a kind of Brechtian distancing. Montage is not a "sum" but an "overcoming." The whole "retroacts" on the parts, by virtue of the "principle of organicity" enunciated by Kuleshov.

Montage is therefore at the antipodes of the "reflection theory" of socialist realism, denying being in perpetual becoming (Heraclitus) and "the eternal process of movement, of the birth of contradictions and their resolution" (Lenin).

Analyzing the "deconstruction" processes of the famous Psycho 1960, Sébastien Rongier ("It's all in your imagination," Alfred Hitchcock, "Sublime Psycho") shows how Alfred Hitchcock was able to take advantage of the montage lessons of Russian avant-gardists to satisfy his own objectives (North by Northwest). Hitchcock excelled in the art of putting into abyss the spectator / authors relationships like Dziga Vertov who, in Man with a Movie Camera 1929, had revealed the tricks of montage. Hitchcock handled distancing techniques masterfully to deceive the spectator's expectation. Nothing like the "advertising dismantling" process of the trailer, in which the filmmaker offers us a visit to the crime scenes...

The crucial moment is the famous shower murder scene. Shock and stupor, fascination and terror, horror and jouissance are at the rendezvous of this moment worthy of the Kantian "sublime" and its unheard-of "emergence." But if in Kant it is a question of phenomena of Nature, in Hitchcock horror emerges at the heart of banality. The sublime according to Kant produces a "negative pleasure" that induces a judgment. This applies to the shower scene: what should not have happened, what should only arouse disgust is perceived inevitably as a "montage," of which the spectator feels the vertigo and of which he intellectually decomposes the processes, in an undeniable aesthetic jouissance.

Hitchcock circumvented Hollywood censorship by making "see" what should not be seen. To the point that the "disaster staging" does not only concern the crime under the shower but represents the first anticipation, visual and popular, of a violent social crisis in gestation.

MONTAGE, ASSEMBLAGE AND DIVERSITY

Hélène Sirven ("Aesthetics of Antonin Carême's pièces montées, delicious assemblages") regales us with the fabulous universe of Antonin Carême (1783-1833), founder of haute cuisine and true architect of the luxury pièce montée, very prized by courts throughout Europe. His insane culinary "montages" and table installations were inspired by his travels and immense culture, from classical antiquity and Egyptian decoration to English or exotic gardens...

Contemporary art has remembered this art of ephemeral montage, comparable to a oneiric spectacle while being a memento mori transformed into participating performance. Through his aesthetics of instability, Carême did not ignore the fragility of worlds. His pièces montées represented an elevation before "digestion then the disappearance of delights and vanities."

Other artists have practiced culinary creation, from Arcimboldo to the contemporary Saverio Lucariello. Daniel Spoerri was one of the most talented montage and assemblage artists of the gastronomic.

Laurette Célestine's article ("The universe of sape: art of vestimentary assemblage or art of living?") takes us without transition into the universe of sape. Everything is good for making the most audacious assemblages of great brands and luxury accessories, by resourcefulness if necessary (exchanges, black market, recycling). Sape has its specific language, its word games, its picturesque nicknames, its verbal jousts, a whole parodic mythology.

Was it born with European second-hand clothing from West Africa? Does it descend from French dandies of the 19th century or from Sunday "teddy boys" of English working-class milieus (Manuel Charpy)? Did it appear with the return of Congolese fighters from the First World War? Or in the 50s, when Congolese who had studied in Paris opened "existentialist" boutiques with designer clothes? Or again in the Bacongo district of Brazzaville during the folkloric 70s?

Sapology testifies to colonial violence and desires for identity emancipation. The sapeurs opposed Mobutu. The dissidence of these excluded produced "a creolization of Western fashion" (Alain Mabanckou).

Sape persists as revolt, despite the criticisms it undergoes. In Paris the sapeurs are at Château Rouge, at Barbès, in nightclubs, but also increasingly in the suburbs. Evangelical churches welcome them everywhere. In Congo they spread to villages. They go beyond borders, due to migrations, and integrate women. Sape becomes planetary. It is a culture that reactualizes myths, a political and non-violent art of living extended to other arts.

Steve Gadet ("Sampling or the art of sampling in hip-hop culture: assemblage or theft?") is a teacher-researcher in American civilization at the University of the Antilles and a rapper immersed in hip-hop culture, which concerns dance, music, visual arts (graffiti), DJing (DJ techniques) and rap.

Sampling is an assemblage of heterogeneous sound fragments inserted by beatmakers into existing works. It was born in the Bronx of the 70s, where artists, condemned to resourcefulness, were passionate about borrowing, transgression, détournement. Taking off one's laces, putting one's cap or jeans on backwards, exhibiting luxury brands despite one's poverty, diverting the meaning of words: all these ideas have been reinvested in fashion and haute couture.

This art has often been poorly judged because of its supposed facility, its extravagant profits in the 80s, its intellectual property wars and its trials (Copyright Criminals by Benjamin Franzen, 2009).

In fact, sampling mistreats dominant culture by reducing the gap between creators and consumers – everyone can create from the drum machine – and exacerbates in a threatening way the interest in an unknown Black American culture.

Popular music press, the great cultural industry, many musicians and critics have not well understood the subtleties of this art taken for plagiarism... when it descends from Andy Warhol and a mastered aesthetics of collage.

Edu Monteiro ("Parangolaamb") describes to us Senegalese wrestling ("laamb" in Wolof), this magical ritual of African tradition, which has become a true national sport. Wrestlers are covered with clothes (coats, covers) and accessories (necklaces, horns, snakes, goat heads, leather) that form extravagant "assemblages" endowed with supernatural powers. Today highly mediatized and urbanized, laamb, practiced in the largest stadiums, perpetuates itself in the most remote villages. Martinique's ladja and Brazil's capoeira are diasporic reminiscences of these struggles which have the function, thanks to trance, of capturing the invisible.

Edu Monteiro weaves rapprochements between laamb and the Parangolés of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, these layers of clothes with varied materials, colors and textures, often poor, similar to the accoutrements of African sorcerers, dancers and fighters, which earned Oiticica to be disavowed by the anti-Africanism of the military dictatorship 1964. These assemblages agreed perfectly with the favela and samba, born in Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century and heir to African slave percussions.

Inspired by Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Dubuffet, Oiticica did not content himself with rethinking forms: his Parangolés convoked the whole of culture and incited the fusion of the spectator-actor with "the primitive potential of life." This "anti-art" went further than the attempts of Western avant-gardes to reintroduce myth (Breton) into the narrowness of the intellectual and bourgeois world.

MONTAGE AND ASSEMBLAGE PRACTICES (SENEGAL, FRANCE, QUEBEC)

Babacar Mbaye Diop ("Daouda Ndiaye, an artist in the transversality of forms of expression") pays tribute to a very famous artist from Senegal. Trained in art therapy, Daouda Ndiaye creates in a spirit of personal development. He coordinates large environmental projects, using recycling and recovery of which he is a fervent adept. Accustomed to collecting papers, bottles, fabrics, tar, nets, plastics, used objects, he metamorphoses them through drawing, collage, photo or installations. The most incongruous objects and materials figure in his assemblages: grigris or old shoes, fragments of rusty motors or television, scratched records, packaging cardboard, reeds, and so on... The jubilatory experience of assemblage takes precedence over the realization of a form.

The author distinguishes two tendencies in contemporary assemblage: that which arranges objects or materials chosen for their history, their diverse significations, without prejudging the result; and that which starts from a precise idea of creation and chooses objects in relation to this idea. Daouda Ndiaye practices both methods.

In the first case he makes emerge the potentialities, the unstable and provisional, the waste of consumer society (the Consumables series). But he also transforms and sculpts recovered paper to conceive the "100 papers" project and the gigantic Wall of the undocumented 2000, or Maasai hunter arrows in homage to Africa's past...

Heiner Wittmann ("From book-montage to Michel Sicard's mobile assemblages, poet and plastic artist") makes us penetrate into Michel Sicard's artist books. Berlin palimpsest 1994 makes the city appear as "space of stratification" in a universe of erasure and forgetting.

Sicard went from concepts of devices borrowed from Deleuze and Lyotard to creation on living materials, fabrics or waste. From 2004 onwards he produces in duo with Mojgan Moslehi. The "Signs and Flux" exhibition 2008 plays on erosion, fluctuation, the impossibility of the image to fix itself. The theme of the absent body dominates in the Spectral Body series, compositions of painting and cut and empty clothes, moved by a kind of tornado. It is the world of the aleatory, chance and catastrophe (Paul Virilio), a "dystopian universe." The Language of the Stars 2004 is a non-leafable book whose deconstructivity will inspire other "quartered" installations like Notes de brouillard 2017.

Then come mobile assemblages, "sculptures of floating papers" that play "overlaps, superpositions, drips" (24 hours of rain), black paintings that "make writing move" (Darkroom, 2016), works nourished by "dark energy," at the frontier of painting and physics, or of impermanence (Remanence). The "recto-verso montage/collage" is supposed to make sensitive an obscure reality of the past, (The Hidden Face of the Moon).

We refer to the somewhat hermetic explanations that accompany the "non-work" of the artist duo presented in a "non-exhibition" ("Confinement," Saint-Denis, 2019) to speak of "disseminations, tremblings, ruptures," of "whirlwind of possibilities, virtual or living," readable in Sartrian terms of "nothing, except a 'proliferation of this'!"

The plastic artist Bernard Paquet ("Mounting painting in search of a milieu") introduces us much more concretely into the manufacturing secrets of a series of works realized between 1987 and ("Assemblage of the proto-aesthetic paradigm in the Americas"), the proto-aesthetic paradigm of the Americas was born with the "founding trauma" of 1492, which laid the foundations of an "aesthetic deterritorialization," of a "chaosmosis" (Guattari), of a "thought as heterogenesis" (Éric Alliez). From the shock of worlds, analyzed here in a very documented and erudite way, was to be born this "composite and tectonic" sensitivity that characterizes the aesthetics of the New World: puzzle, mosaic, kaleidoscope, "eruptive hybridity" always reworked from fragments, whose very existence troubles the thought of "organizing reason" and unity, each fragment being in itself a microcosm. Édouard Glissant, with the help of the metaphors of the Whole-World and the rhizome, reflected tirelessly on the bridges, métissages, weavings and assemblages made possible by the incredible shocks, natural earthquakes and historical earthquakes at the origin of a singular modernity. Between Western aesthetics (Baumgarten, Hegel) and decolonial sensitivity, "legatee" of the trans-American proto-aesthetics," this new modernity is embodied for example in the strange "transhistorical assemblages" hybrids of Jamaican Colin Garland or the apparently chaotic installations of the Entrechocs series by Valérie John.

For Scarlett Jésus ("Reflections on the notions of montage and assemblage about some works of three artists: Sébastien Jean, Eddy Firmin and Florence Poirier-Nkpa") artistic montage is a free recomposition that has nothing to do with the "assembly line" that adjusts spare parts to realize a finished product. Montage worthy of the name is "susceptible in turn to engender new assemblages" and to restore grandeur to despised elements.

Scarlett Jésus describes an untitled work 2012 by Haitian Sébastien Jean, made of elements collected at random but sorted on purpose: spring mattress, damaged sheet metal, car steering wheel, wire, planks, aluminum. From the skillful assemblage of these fragments emerges a dark silhouette caged or crucified. Voodoo prowls. Lévi-Strauss's mythical thought comes alive in the artist's strange compositions (the bris-collage).

Scarlett Jésus then interests herself in Eddy Firmin's Egoportraits, parodic assemblages that stage the "ruse of intelligence" of the descendants of slaves, "tinkering" with the means at hand. His head molds declined infinitely are masterpieces of imaginative wandering, of caustic anti-Western humor, without fear of the trivial or bad taste.

Florence Poirier-Nkpa in Saint-Martin realizes "avatars," synthetic images obtained from elements of her own face grafted onto the digital portraits of other individuals. Her transgender chimeras, which inevitably metamorphose, are often disturbing, like her NoName#21 2018 with its three nested unidentifiable heads.

The "aesthetics of blurring" questions identity, otherness and gender, in the name of a "creolization" in becoming.

Christian Bracy ("Articulations, disarticulations, reformulations") appropriates the words "culture" (Lévi-Strauss), "crisis of meaning," "mismatch" to defend a political conception of art. Works must account for the shocks undergone by the artist in the post-Auschwitz (Adorno), confronted with the only raw material and a canvas that "is no longer window" (Alberti, 15th century) "but surface" (Françoise Monnin).

The author applies his observations to five contemporary Guadeloupean artists. Antonio Roscetti creates from spontaneous drawings reworked indefinitely with the help of digital and heterogeneous materials. Michel Rovelas works "at the frontiers of chaos," in search of a lost unity. Daniel Dabriou, "photographer-author," produces assemblages legendized with diverted phrases. The drawings and images of "body-monuments" by Béliza Troupé mix earth, water, textiles, traditional medicines, to celebrate Amerindian natives and their "Afro-descendants." Stanislas Musquer associates Haitian pictorial inspiration and borrowings from Christian medieval books of hours or anatomical plates (Des parcelles de peaux noires sur la peau blanche, 2018).

Is art metaphysical as Malraux claimed? Christian Bracy, following Nathalie Obadia (Geopolitics of Contemporary Art, 2019), reflects more down-to-earth on the promises of globalized art. His conclusion is pessimistic: emancipated works do not always find interlocutors, because Southern countries remain tributary of the economic and symbolic universes mediated by Northern countries.

In his interview with Sophie Ravion d'Ingianni ("Heterogeneity, discontinuity, assemblages and collages in Hugues Henri's work"), Hugues Henri disavows "post-modern" assemblages empty of meaning. And if he compares his "lambiscopes" (objectives screwed to Pacific shells, the lambis) to Dali's "lobster telephones," playful and poetic, most of his works are engaged. His installation Balseros de La Méduse 2019, besides the allusion to Géricault, offers no difficulty of interpretation: it is an assemblage of life jackets, suitcases, wooden masts, survival blankets, one wrapping a mannequin painted in sienna earth acrylic, empty gaze and white teeth. The same goes for European Public Opinion which brings together drawings of characters equipped with 3D glasses, mannequins head down and building models girded with scrap metal and surmounted by fake video cameras. Civil War – Visual War 1995 parodies the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by its impalements of typewriters, computers gutted by metal rods, its electronic components and panels mimicking software. Video montages of media objects transformed into weapons materialize Paul Virilio's "virtual lure."

The artist insists on differentiating himself from Braque and Picasso, from Arte Povera and New Realism. He prefers to claim Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, or Eisenstein when he describes his digital photomontages of Amerindians, whose circular feather ornaments coincide with the wheels of a steam engine, thus denouncing the dispersion of the last Kalinagos of Guadeloupe at the arrival of sugar industry machines. His assemblage-column AMERIKKK FIRST, from 2016, is an explicit anti-racist message against Donald Trump's election.

Martine Potoczny ("Assemblage, montage and metamorphoses: crossed looks on the practices of Christophe Mert (Martinique) and Kcho (Cuba)"), who interviewed Mert and Kcho in their studios, recognizes in their "open" works (Umberto Eco) affinities with Schwitters. The Martinican artist Serge Hélénon adds that these respond to the specificities of Caribbean assemblage, conditioned by a culture of survival and a primitive economy society.

Christophe Mert grew up by the sea in a former Amerindian habitation site. Objects picked up in the sand, shells, old wood, rejects thrown onto the beach of his childhood, waste torn from "bulky items" and wild dumps necessarily lead him to assemblage. He mistreats the wood of pallets or iron drums arrived by boats. He dismantles them, burns them, destroys them on site before creating. The sheet metal recovered here and there, the remains of rails and wagons used to transport cane to sugar factories speak of human wrecks. Mert recreates from "scraps and pieces, fossil witnesses of the history of an individual or a society" (Florence de Mèredieu).

His studio is an incredible bric-a-brac of objects and materials accumulated on a ground that he names "chaos assemblage" or "creative magma," and on which grow his giant totems, his Soul Healers in scrap metal and small household appliances, similar to Chamoiseau's old warriors. His Atoumo 2013 are panels in raw wood and sheet metal nested, scaled, wounded, scarified and rusty. A lighting system reveals words, faces and presences...

Born on an island off Cuba, Kcho belongs to the generation of 1990 artists haunted by isolation, migration, navigation and exile. He too practices collection and appropriation: dry branches, palm leaves, nets, black and red earth from Cuba, pieces of quays, pontoons, holed boats, ropes, oars, propellers, buoys and other sea rejects. His "crazy vessels," "surrealist," at once boats, cars or houses, are dismembered and recomposed. El David is a gigantic floating sculpture. The monumental El Pensador, Cuban interpretation constantly reworked of Rodin, assembles materials and objects from earth and sea. According to Emmanuel Guignon, Kcho's work amounts to "a shipwreck."

DOSSIER 13TH CUBA BIENNIAL

Lise Brossard's article ("Seven days at the 13th Havana Biennial") proposes an illustrated stroll through the different exhibition venues of the 13th Havana Contemporary Art Biennial of April-May 2019, "La Construcción de lo Posible," whose diversity and inventiveness of works amazes. Utopia, engagement, participation of inhabitants, globalization, crossing of past and today's cultures, memory of tragedies are the key words.

During this biennial, two artists particularly impressed Anne-Catherine Berry ("Montage and assemblage in Richard-Viktor Sainsily Cayol (Guadeloupe) and Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy (Cuba): an act of resistance and deconstruction") who both resort to fragments "glued, nailed, stapled, sewn, nested, attached," symbolic of a loss of totality,

Grands Crus (like the base of the installation). The metal spikes, symbols of Western order, give the barrels an air of armed fish or voodoo dolls. The barrel metaphorizes the tortures of the black body and the enrichment of the colonists.

The paintings, sculptures or installations of Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy express the wounds of Cuban space, past (the slave trade) and contemporary (the economic crisis of the 90s, the reorganization of socialism, mass emigration, the influx of tourists). Resistiendo en el tiempo (Resisting in time) is a kind of container, a montage of rusty elements, an interlocking of pieces of different structures, a colored mosaic letting voids appear. As many variations as "broken, recomposed and plural identities." Metal represents Ogún, god of war and renewal in Yoruba mythology. It is a skin that keeps the scars left by the forge fire, symbol of suffering and regeneration. Welding or sewing points and charred wood refer to the wounds of slavery and African scarification art. Ciudad quemada (Burned city) is an arrangement of burned wooden boxes similar to the precarious habitats of the island and all the world's migrants...

Paraphrasing Césaire the author concludes that art is a non-violent weapon against the violence of History.

CONCLUSION

From the reading of this journal emerge clear definitions of the concepts of montage and assemblage, and relatively homogeneous, with some precious nuances according to the authors. The presentations of works from sections III to VI are rich in reveries, utopia and poetry, and strong with a quest for identity to restore. The immediate metaphorical dimension of the described assemblages relays the theoretical abstraction of parts I and II, but all articles are peppered with historical, philosophical or aesthetic references, often very recent.

The claimed cosmopolitanism echoes the aspirations of the first avant-gardes, even if "global art" (vigorously contested by at least one of the authors) is no longer the internationalism of the early 20th century... One cannot help thinking that the Havana biennial looks very much like those of other great capitals...

But proof is made that montage and assemblage are absolutely contemporary practices, illustrated by the exceptional richness of Caribbean production, which does not deprive itself, while drawing from European sources, of "creolizing" them or turning them into derision in the name of a "decolonial" revolt.

The most moving is undoubtedly the allusion, in several articles, to a "primitive" source of montage, since in Zurich in 1918 Dada wanted to be "Negro" above all, between Huelsenbeck's furious dances and drums and Marcel Janco's masks, these assemblages of poor materials, bearers, like the works described here, of a potential for contesting the dominant order.

February 2021

Dominique Berthet is director of the Center for Studies and Research in Aesthetics and Plastic Arts, 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