Nowadays, there is a lot of talk about the end of the world. It must be said that there is no shortage of threats: epidemics, global warming, ecological collapse… But, ultimately, what if it was “just” the end of the human species that we were facing? Certainly, for us, this will not simply be another extinction on the blue planet… But from the point of view of the ant, the cockroach or the bacteria, things are perhaps not so dramatic.
Thacker and pessimism
After being interested in numerous writers and intellectuals, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Baudelaire, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Marshall Berman, the artist Carl Trahan now forges links with the thought of one of his contemporaries , the philosopher Eugene Thacker… In his most recent exhibition, entitled On THE ashes of the starsTrahan challenges the pessimism of Thacker, professor at the New School in New York who published, among other things, the books In the Dust of This Planet (2011) and Infinity Resignation (2018). Thacker has a relationship with history that is rather dark. This, in Trahan’s own words, developed a reflection on a world without us, “a world which could be both before and after our presence on the planet that we call Earth, in a cosmos indifferent to our existence “. A point of view which goes against a reductive anthropocentrism.
Thacker’s intellectual approach could only appeal to Trahan, who created an art that focused in particular on the tragedy embodied by technological modernity. In an era where the wellness industry is growing exponentially, with its slew of yoga and spirituality classes, in a society that makes excessive use of antidepressants, in a world that tells us the duty to being happy, where we could even say that happiness is a form of tyranny, this is an attitude that has something to stand out.
A work which also makes links with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose famous short story Trahan cites in his presentation text, The Call of Cthulhu (1928): “We live on an island of placid ignorance, in the black oceans of infinity, and we were not destined for long voyages. »
A refined apocalypse?
In this very dark exhibition where all the works are black or almost all – two rooms with neon lights diffuse a purplish tone that is both disturbing and refined – a precious sensory device occupies the center of a room. This installation has an olfactory aspect, something rather rare in ancient or even contemporary art. Trahan created an eau de toilette called Erebus, in reference to the character from Greek mythology who embodies “the darkness and obscurity of the underworld”… By lifting a small glass bell, the visitor will inhale a scent that is both coppery and peppery. and lined with incense, a bit stifling. Is this a form of aestheticization of nothingness? An elegant and evanescent tomb for a fugitive humanity? A sort of fragment of a “joyful apocalypse”, to use the expression of the Austrian Hermann Broch, a writer who lived through another historical moment carrying an apocalypse, that of Nazism? There is also in Trahan a form of dandy symbolism worthy of Duke Jean des Esseintes, a character in the novel Backwards (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans, the final descendant of a long line, who knew how to savor the end of his existence and his family thanks to sublime and very controlled refinements…
On the ashes of this world, perfumes of eternity will perhaps bloom.