Where is the corpse hidden?

It was in the mid-90s that I first came across AT in action.
At the University of Chicoutimi, in the depths of winter, he had given a complete reading of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer (already blacklisted, a prelude to the wokeism then in gestation). Not in the manner of an actor but as an artist inhabited by the work, now whispered, now hummed, sung, howled, for nearly 4 hours. The main reproaches, at the time, were his Marseille accent, which surfaced here and there, and his attire, a short-sleeved linen shirt. The accent was taken as mockery of the Provençals, and the shirt as a provocation towards the Quebecers, who have to endure sub-zero temperatures for a good part of the year!

In a mature world this action would have remained what it basically was: a light action, a touch schoolboyish. But in this tottering world it has improved, aged like a good Burgundy, and has unfortunately proved over time to be as iconoclastic as — indeed far more than — the emblematic actions of the golden age of action art.

America Ergo Sum

For the Viennese Actionists, indeed, history was fixed, the villains and the powerful were known, and the risks were, at bottom, measured and established. To have the intuition, thirty years ahead of time, that the most violent attacks on freedom would come from virtuous censors was far bolder than all the festive vein-cutting and other institutional coprophagia. It is surely this sense of intuitive identification which meant that, more than 6 years after the screening of America Ergo Sum — a video also presented during that winter — its title, like its content (the scanned chanting of extracts from Normance set to music!), entered into troubling resonance with the dramatic events of September 2001. (For the record, the “We are all Americans” of Colombani in Le Monde.)

Mediumistic grace of a simple detail...

And he still finds a way to unsettle me. That is why, ever since, I cannot approach one of his pieces without searching — behind the clumsiness of a line, a heavy plastering or a light paste — for the mediumistic grace of a simple detail, of a whole.
Whether before a photograph, an oil or a drawing, as in Antonioni's Blow-Up, I scrutinise, I search, I let myself be submerged: “where is the corpse hidden?”