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.