Work, life and way of being by Gilles Collard

A whole twentieth century can be read in the tension between the exigency of the artwork and the anxiety of life and in the attempts to resorb each other, the surrealists (the resolution of life by the ‘art) to the situationists (the overcoming of art through life), two points of the century-old iceberg failed on the continent, drifting revolutions. These seminar sessions will aim through different examples to illuminate this knot of work and life. Between heroes and bastards, there arises the question of the rules that can guide action, orient the forms of art and thought. The old fetish of art is nothing if it does not change our ways of being, while to live without the worry of a shaping of our experience avoids what matters in our time. More than ever suspended on a horizon of expectation, our gestures seek today foundation and legitimacy beyond this sharing between the urgency of the days and the requirement of the creation. Perhaps way of being and livelihoods today are a response to a fragile and uncertain legacy of the twentieth century.

Gilles Collard founded the journal Pylône in 2003. Since 2016, he has been professor of philosophy at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels, La Cambre, where he is also the pedagogical director of the Atelier des écritures contemporaines. He is currently preparing a book on the life and work of Klaus Mann for Grasset Publishing.