FOUR GOOD REASONS TO DO WITHOUT A BIOGRAPHY

The first reason is that a general exhibition – all the more so if it is detailed – of the adventures that have made an existence is an undressing that bothers me, because I am poorly made and because I am chilly. These adventures concern me, I have two or three secrets and I'm wary of little tricksters who claim they have nothing to hide. I am even more wary of ingenuous who are convinced that they have nothing to hide. I prefer to exhibit photographs rather than facts, although a photograph is a fact in itself.

The second reason is as old and as new as Marcel Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve. There is a healthy schizophrenia between the personality which is in the common world - if the personality is a reality and if there is a common world - and the personality which is in another world, that of its creations, a particular, intimate, unique world. Robert Louis Stevenson, who should not, however, be confused with Mr. Hyde or Long John Silver, wrote in The Lantern Bearers: "... for no man lives in external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls." Sometimes this room is not warm, it is freezing or it is a furnace, disturbing shapes drag themselves there, difficult, heartbreaking or ridiculous shapes that we strive to make pass from the phantasmagorical room to external reality through the trap of literature, painting, photography or any other means of materialization.

The third reason follows from the second. The real biography, the only one that is basically interesting and roughly truthful because it does not claim to elucidate the mysteries – of which we are made and which are pitch black – nor to solve the enigmas – of which we are also the sphinxes and which are insoluble –, this is the inner biography. The best inner biography that we have the leisure to offer to the curious, whatever the reason for their curiosity, is the one that can be extrapolated from what we write, what we paint, what we photograph. And, also, from what we don't write, what we don't paint, what we don't photograph. Then we hope that the curious will be willing and will know how not to give an overly abusive or too summary interpretation of what we have written, painted, photographed. We ask them politely and we promise to exercise an equal prudence in a situation where the roles would be reversed.

The last reason, if all the same I can talk a little about myself, is both preponderant and anecdotal. There is in the vast nomenclature of human oddities a certain category of unusual psychic twists which the usual psychic twists consider as distortions, deformities, which perhaps are and which fabricate creatures somewhat perpendicular, more or less oblique or off-center, tangled, elliptical, it depends. These creatures never know, for example, who they are or even what they are, probably because quite simply they are not, at least in the conventional and arbitrary meaning. All they know is that they are because they are there, because something is there, an uncertain crystallization of which they are acutely aware and which nevertheless defines them with sufficient precision for the fraction of the rest of the world with which they are in contact recognizes them or imagines it recognizes them, because there needs to be a minimum of convenience in exchanges. And all they fear is that in the eyes of this fraction their biography will look like a cubist painting or an abstract canvas, an illumination from a mad monk, a bloody figure engraved with a razor on his own stomach by a lunatic or a broken brain drug addict. It would be very disparaging to see them that way. If they have a minimum of metaphorical spirit - the maximum is preferable - these creative creatures just send back in a deformed, reformed, revised, worked, improved way according to their taste and their capacities, fragments of what they perceived and thought. As far as I know this is one of the elementary ways of defining what art is, whether or not we are on the side of the usual, and it is a much better biographical information than any chronology and any artificial recording of events.