Of the need for a counter-power iconoclast Alain Dikann
In the strict sense of the term, the iconoclastic current aimed to destroy religious icons and all symbols or representations of of the sacred. But iconoclasm is also an attitude of manifest opposition to received ideas, ready-to-think and, in this case, ready-to-see.Faced with the surge of advertising images, cliché- images, formatted, standardized and subliminal images, it has never been so very necessary to re-introduce other images. Images that arouse criticism, reflection, discussion, and debate. Images that promote psychic respiration and openness to the Other. Lively mages in the incessant flow of deadly images poured out from the matrix.In this world of images of the false, the artist has a duty to show other images, other pictorial representations of the world in which he lives. For this reason, the artist has no other choice but to assume a real political function and act as the mediator . He must oppose the pictorial representations of technicist propaganda extolling a kind of half-augmented, half-hybrid, smiling and conquering man, the projection of a post-humanity doomed to extract himself from nature. Rather than showing a superman or an ideal woman, the artist has the duty to represent the 21st century human as he is: a caveman, certainly evolved, but still animal, and always likely to plunge back into the worst barbarity. A “neo-Lascaux” hominid, prey to doubts and in search of benchmarks, a reflection of post-industrial civilization. Because if the man of today has the possibility of conceiving and disseminating three dimensional digital images, it nonetheless remains an element of nature, constitutive of nature. And without the world of objects which he created for himself to better ensure his sociability, man is naked. As naked as the caveman who left his mark on mineral walls and carved animal bones.
In the 1980s, Henri Laborit, neurobiologist, philosopher and connoisseur of human behavior predicted: “As long as we have not very widely disseminated through humans on this planet , the way their brains work, the way they use it ,and as long as we have not said that until now it has always been used to dominate the other, there is little chance that anything changes (…). Primitive man , with his cut flint culture was linked obscurely, but completely, to the whole of the cosmos. Today's worker does not even have the ball bearing culture that his ow automatic gesture shapes through a machine.</u> The artist, who takes his responsibilities, opposes the world of falsehood and become a vector of truth. To this end, like a vampire, he must draw his energy from human vitality and make apparent what the majority wishes not to see. It’s been said that art makes visible. In addition, the artist has to empathize with the world in which he lives. This supposes and gives rise to a real work of opening the mind so that the artist welcomes, thanks to the canvas and the retina, what has not yet been made visible.
