Artist Marc Séguin offers his perspective on current events and the world.
Somewhere between Fermont and Sept-Îles, a few days ago. Conditions a thousand kilometers from urban social life. Rain on the tin roof of a camp during the night. Poetry of a happy sleep. 10 meters from a large and beautiful river, the Moisie, abnormally low this year. It was cool when we woke up even though the end of summer is magnificent. At this height, it was already a bit like autumn and red appeared on the leaves.
At the limit of minimal comfort, therefore, I lit the small wood stove to chase away the humidity, and a little for the sound of the logs. Here, the landmarks of life are visible and easy to name: water, food, fire. The luxury aisle is far away. How do I dress? We open the door and that’s how we decide. Not many mirrors or glances…
I had a big smile when, a few hours later – while eating a toast sliced white bread with a slice of orange Velveeta cheese – I read about the Royalmount project. And about this debate, in the background and more or less discreet, about luxury and its values. We say to ourselves that it is on the label and the brand that wealth seems important. We are not talking about utility here, a Gucci bag does the same job as a backpack bought at Canadian Tire. But above all: if I wear Versace boxers, will I pick more blueberries than with George underwear from Walmart? And will the blueberries be better? Would I have some added value, even naked and without symbols of wealth? (I smile here.)
Little or no judgment, I swear. If, in order to exist, we need to stand out with a luxury brand, that says a lot about ourselves. About us. It’s OK. A simple observation. A social us that sometimes appears torn in its values. About this need to be “special”.
To keep at a distance the generic existence that, like a horrible punishment, would condemn us to not standing out. Or worse: to not being admired. Or even worse: to being less loved. Luxury serves to make others feel, by displaying it, that we are better than them without saying it with words.
There is no guilty verdict here. We understand the need. It is the consequences that are worrying; those of the social classes and the ravines into which they each sink on their own side. And that of the mirage of virtues: we are perhaps not as social-democratic and benevolent as we like to think. Or, on the contrary: we are also this strange mixture of contradictions and the shopping center that has just opened amplifies it.
The feeling of the right to individual happiness prevailing, in fact, over the rather theoretical one of a project of which one is a part. To be part of the group, but to be better, at all costs. And to identify with this marketing of winner who thinks big and who loudly displays his success. The image will be proof of everything. What time is it? Wait until I look at my Rolex, even if it displays the same time as a company sign on the side of the 20 in Sainte-Julie.
Yet I will share the blueberries with everyone, without saying or claiming or pretending that they come from the 50e parallel, fattened by black bear shit or by millennia of ecology, collected in empty yogurt pots of a house brand. In this fundamental existential debate, they will have been picked “with no underwear”, because it was a hot afternoon in the sun, unable to decide and assume between the vanity of putting on, under dirty and torn jeans, boxers that are worth the skin of the buttocks and the humility that sometimes inhabits me when I reset the clocks. The right time seems to be between the two.
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