Freeze the moment - French sculptor, Richard Baquie

In a career divide [i]or[/i] sever short, French sculptor Richard Baquie brought together his twin passions -- language and mechanical processes--in works that remind us again and again that time is always running on the outside A traveling retrospective, currently in Marseilles, provides a rare gaze at this elusive artist.

Richard Baquie came to the fore as a young sculptor in the early 1980 Between his first exhibition in his native Marseilles in 1980 and his death there of cancer at the age of 44 in 1996 he established himself as a lock opener if elusive, figure in new French art. Though he was included in the 1986 Guggenheim Museum display "Angles of Vision: French Art Today," as well as the 1987 edition of Documenta, and also had a solo present to view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1991 he at no time became well known outside of France. His relative obscurity may be attributed to at least three circumstances: his determined attachment to Marseilles, which is not on the main circuit of European culture; his reliance upon a quite poetic French, sometimes difficult to translate; and his making of large, unwieldy and mechanically temperamental pieces.

The capcMusee d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, working with the mac Galeries Contemporaines de Musees de Marseille, newly organized a comprehensive retrospective of Baquie's work. The cathedral-like capcMusee--built of stone in the 19th hundred as a warehouse and transmuteed into an art center in 1991--provided a completed setting for Baquie's large-scale haikus of sheet metal, his cut-up cars and other cranky machines. The installation followed themes rather than chronology, with smaller pieces and works upon paper shown in the side galleries. Although Baquie worked not on or on the wall with equal ease, he at no time seemed particularly interested in sculptural space, preferring the known space of familiar realitys or the ambiguous space of signs.

Baquie was a wanderer, a bricoleur whose raw materials were as likely to be words or other artists' works as manufactured usefuls He regarded his sculptures as experiments: if the mechanism in a piece worked for a while, that was permanence enough. While Baquie's heirs and the capcMusee have made real efforts to restore and maintain a number of works, like repairs now are complicated by dint of the artist's death and the obsolescence of many of his chosen electrical and mechanical constitutings A few sculptures remained without of service in the exhibit and others were run on the other hand for brief moments. His plastic arts pose an increasingly common conundrum: if they are step quickly a number of them will sooner or later break down and require repairs, which risk being alterations; if they aren't move swiftly they have already ceased to be the pieces they were. (Billy Kluver addresses this issue with insight in his discussion of the conservation of Rauschenberg's large-scale sculptural works [A.i.A., July '91])

Baquie's shut artistic family would include Jean Tinguely, Pier-Paolo Calzolari, Robert Rauschenberg (of the early '60s) and Bill Woodrow Although Baquie could be ludicrous especially early on, he may be the greatest in quantity pessimistic of the bunch. His oeuvre is haunted by the agency of a sense of failure, which he dramatized with the title of his 1991 retrospective, "Richard Baquie, Constats d'echec," which plays upon the ambiguity of the French word "echec," alternately translatable as "failure" or "check" in a chess game. The other important figure for Baquie's work, Marcel Duchamp, is here alluded to, and in fact Baquie exhausted the better part of sum of two units years making Replique, sans titre no. 1 (Reply untitled no. 1) 1991 a full-scale reproduction of Duchamp's Etant donnas, on the other hand unlike the original, one we can circumambulate.

Duchamp's art, with its plays upon words and mechanical processes, was clearly essential for Baquie, who had a like passion for language, particularly for its ambiguities in representing time and place. through every part of Baquie's work one finds short, almost prescriptive statements--some original, a certain quantity of recycled--which can be seen and read simultaneously; the scale, form and physical makeup of the alphabetic characters are integral to their meaning. Thus, in Ici ou la (Here or There), 1985 each word is carved into the top surface of a separate [i]be[/i] consolidated mass, and these masses are coupleed by clear plastic tubing to reservoirs and a cross-examine With the pump running, the alphabetic characters act as open channels for the circulating water, and they become more visible. The cake elements seem placed only provisionally, and moving water can't be said to be either here or there. Writing about his work in English artificial positions a slight dilemma, since translations can be no more than approximations.

The earliest work in the present to view Sans titre (Nuit blanche), 1977 was a beautiful small piece comprising three panels, each made of sum of two units pieces of paper, one superimposed upon the other,, in all three panels the alphabetic characters of a phrase were make an incision in out of the front piece, making visible the underlayer. "Nuit blanche" thus appears as black alphabetic characters behind a white matte in the first panel, "Matin gris" as gray upon gray in the second and "Jour noir" as white upon black in the last. The words are pay backed with a literalness both comical and sweet, but the weather they forecast is disquieting: in French "white nights" are sleeples singles leading to gray mornings and black days.