Indifferent like a ready-made

Indifferent like a ready-made

Indifferent like a silo in open countryside

Indifferent like a cluster of skyscrapers haloed by emptiness from up to toe

Indifferent like the inscrutable smile of a newly-born

Indifferent like the mute desire of Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare in the Large Glass

Indifferent like a film of glad-wrap over food

Indifferent like the spread of a floodwater

Indifferent like De Chirico’s metaphysical painting where a statue, two dummies, an open square, deserted arcades and empty buildings enter into scenography

Indifference like the view from Sirius

Indifferent like aircon system and escalators, like the junk space of the generic city described and laid out by Rem Koolhaas

Indifferent like a field of ruins

Indifferent like silent movies that arouse expectation

Indifferent like a Zen garden

Indifferent like a deserted plaza revealing its surround of edifices

Indifferent like the feeling of absence of feeling

Indifferent like the desert honed by wind

Indifferent like Buster Keaton upended by a tornado in One Week

Indifferent like rusty machines and worn-out suburban buildings

Indifferent like a vacant lot abandoned to kid’s games

Indifferent like an industrial brownfield

Indifferent like a black and white photo inflecting shades of grey

Indifferent like drops on a window pane that mask and distort perception

Indifferent like hit-man Alain Delon methodically filling a contract in The Samouraï by Jean-Pierre Melville

Indifferent like the marriage of Technique and Nature

Indifferent like superposed layers of insulating material

Indifferent like the zapping of a tele-viewer

Indifferent like the frozen steppe under drifting snow

Indifferent like the nationwide network of motorways

Indifferent like the flowing landscape seen from a train

Indifferent like the thief in Pickpocket by Robert Bresson, who going about his business on the underground, just another of the passengers crammed in one against another pulls up his newspaper holds the gaze of the Other and steals his wallet

Indifferent like the line of the horizon

Indifferent like dull weather

Indifferent like the rocking of a boat with water slapping on its sides

Indifferent like blind facades over which the eye passes

Indifferent like a papier-mâché or cardboard décor, an eyeful or a trompe-l’œil  

Indifferent like the proverbial donkey at equal distance between two bags of oats

Indifferent like mechanics, statistics and the theatre of marionettes

Indifferent like the banal things consigned in the interminable diaries of Maine de Biran and Amiel

Indifferent like democratic equality

Indifferent like a blank voice and the zero degree of writing

Indifferent like a symphony in mute major, with rarefied air and silence

Indifferent like monochrome surfaces in still lifes pulsing with life

Indifferent like the multiplication of autistic objects or nomad monads

Indifferent like these visions of Antonioni’s Red Desert prefiguring Stalker by Tarkowski: in a factory sheltering immense tanks coated in blue or green, suddenly some smoke swirls up, dissolving forms and objects little by little; enormous aerials, whose metallic structure seems heated to white hot, hardly produce any contrast with the grey off-white sky; a form looms up unexpectedly, in a kind of no man’s land, very near to a barrack hut, a silent, majestic ship, like a ghost ship; on leaving a hostile hangar piled up with empty baskets, bells or glass demijohns lie stacked together

Indifferent like an over-exposed photo

Indifferent like a jammed circuit or a saturated network

Indifferent like the floating city of Situationists and Wim Wenders’s camera

Indifferent like mega-numbers subject to their own cumbersome existence

Indifferent like the indeterminate nature of top and bottom, feminine and masculine, full and empty, real and imaginary

Indifferent like the unspecified arriving at its destination

Georges Sebbag

Références    

Georges Sebbag, « Indifferent like a ready-made », L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, n° 336, « Indifférence », septembre-octobre 2001. Traduction anglaise par Ronald Corlette-Theuil de la version française « Indifférent comme un ready-made ».

Georges Sebbag, « Indifferent like a ready-made », Basa, n° 25, revue canarienne d’architecture. Nouvelle traduction anglaise de la version française « Indifférent comme un ready-made ».

Nous reprenons ici la traduction anglaise de L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, n° 336, septembre-octobre 2001.