On 24 June 2005, in Bordeaux, France, the criminal and anti-terrorist brigades burst into Alain Declercq’s studio, where he was working on Mike, a film about the iconography of international plots, following on from his works on 9/11 and the society of control. Declercq was questioned, the studio was searched, his computer and documents analysed and taken apart. Such is the power of our intelligence services, incapable of distinguishing between the real and its reflection. Since then Declercq has been able to finish his film, which has acquired mythical status thanks to the DST.

This was certainly not Declercq’s first successful coup against the logics of control. “Where you goin’ with that gun in your hand”, “One man shot”, “Knife show”, “état de siège” (state of siege) – such are the titles of some of his solo shows. The theme to which Declercq devotes his paintings and videos full of gunshots, abductions and murders is Execution, that naked manifestation of the power of the executive. Fascinated by the way in which the armed forces serve power, whose orders, given and taken in total opacity, are blindly executed by the state apparatus (police, army, intelligence, etc.), Declercq subverts its symbols, accessories and actions. He disguised a Citroën Évasion as a police vehicle (oblivious to oxymoron, French police do not hesitate to equip themselves with this MPV whose name means “Escape”) and, adopting this state ingenium for himself, he lent it to people in the suburbs to drive around at their own legal risk (during the exhibition “Make Up” at the Centre d’Art in Brétigny-sur-Orge, 2002). He transformed preparations for Bastille Day festivities into a coup d’état scenario (in the film État de siège, 2001). He appropriated the iconography of 9/11 so as to transform the world into a universal plot (Mike, 2005). But to what end? In order to remind us of the economic, political and repressive power that, as citizens of the First World, we benefit by and cooperate with, and to show us the extent to which their rules and their violence infuse our everyday life, and to emancipate us from them, if only symbolically. “When pirates seized a boat, and if they changed its name, then the word ‘revenge’ (‘revenge of’) usually featured. And so I constructed my own revenge. I have the freedom to put forward an object like that; the field of the visual arts allows such propositions, and one must be able to accept the slowness of the practice and the irreversibility of the act. It has a calming effect.” Thanks to the pirate Alain Declercq, art becomes the world’s revenge. The procedure constitutes its formal apogee. Just as in October Eisenstein set out to concretely describe the mounting of a machine gun, and as Holger Meins details the composition of a Molotov cocktail in his agitprop films, in his video Escape (2001), his masterwork, Declercq provides a practical explanation of an escape, complete with the paradox due to the fact that the prisoner has managed to get hold of a warder’s uniform: “visually, the person we see escaping all through the film is a warder.”

“Duty officer on case 88776/C/ FG.

Location of incident: Bourges – 18000 –

Statement by M. Declercq in front of superintendents Poret and Boisdet

Clerk: L. Quillerié

When questioned, M. Declercq, born 6 November 1969 in Moulins (department of Allier, France), by profession a ‘plastician’, as he puts it, meaning ‘artist’, of French nationality, living in Paris at 4 Rue des Filles du Calvaire, 3rd arrondissement, was taken to the central police station. In his statement, M. Declercq confessed that this was not his ‘first act’ (misdemeanour). During the 1998 VigiPirate plan, M. Declercq fraudulently infiltrated the police forces. According to him, this infiltration was only an ‘artistic proximity.’ However, he immediately stated that his concern was to ‘survey those who survey.’” (Alain Declercq, Autoportrait.)

Having chosen as his privileged motifs the instruments and logics of policing, Declercq takes up with images the task that a 26 year-old philosopher set himself in 1844: “The goal is to paint the picture of the muted oppression that all social spheres exercise on each other.” In this sense, Declercq sees the police (in all its manifestations, including secret agents, guardians of the peace, soldiers, riot policemen, etc.) not only as icons for simultaneously childish and dissenting impulses, but also and above all as a figure of obedience which for that reason is the emblem of general unawareness, of the way we are all social objects: all obeying – or inhabited by – orders; assigned to a limited public space, endlessly exploitable and disposable. “The critique of this material is a bodily engagement and, in this mano a mano, it doesn’t matter if the adversary is of the same rank, noble or interesting: what matters is touching.” This is the fundamental principle, the aesthetic horizon and concrete limit for both the philosopher and the activist artist: that thought should have practical efficacy. Now, critique is not exercized primarily in the name of another state of the world in which justice might be achieved, nor can it ever be reduced to an antagonism between the negative (the actual state of the world) and the positive (a virtual, desirable state). Fundamentally, it institutes a negative slant. “Real oppression must be made even more oppressive, by adding the consciousness of oppression; shame must be made even more shameful, by revealing it.”

Now, just as Franz Moore, Schiller’s Robber, re-vealed the cruelty of this world by unleashing his own, so Declercq highlights the general disinformation by adding his own ironic disinformation. Perfectly capable of using headed writing paper obtained from Baghdad to fabricate evidence that Saddam Hussein was mixed up in the attacks of 9/11 (which, according to a poll they kept quoting on CNN five years later, 42% of Americans thought he was), Declercq also claimed that his deliberately confusing film Mike was conceived to “prove absolutely any conspiracy theory.” The main point was not to try and dig out the factual truth about what the Islamists called “the Conquest of Manhattan,” but to fabricate in front of our eyes that mental world of argument and evidence that engenders opinion. One of the benefits of this undertaking, which consists in appropriating media-saturating events the way Mario Merz recuperated cinema tickets and trash, is to signify their true nature: as imposing and massive as they may seem, they are waste, the wretched detritus of our consenting not to think about the economic Hiroshimas and Nagasakis that every day are wreaking havoc on the Developing World.

As we can see, something considerable and very serous is at stake in Declercq’s work. As if to offset the potentially overwhelming immensity of such prospects for a simple artist whose only power is symbolic, he immediately has recourse to an aesthetic of toys: little soldiers, cops, warders, cars, revolvers, fire trucks, tanks, drowned villages, racetracks – everything here comes across as simulacrum, like the favourite childhood toys to which the Law has been offered in the form of amusing fetishes. Ultimately, perhaps, the point is not so much to reveal the workings of the society of control as to keep recapturing the enchanted absorption of our childhood games, the only moments of deep happiness offered by life.

In 1841, Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer put together a very unusual pamphlet whose title and principle should really appeal to movie buffs: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist. An Ultimatum. Inside, 140 quotations from Hegel were printed facing Biblical quotations. On the surface this big montage was designed to praise the anti-religious aspect of Hegel’s thought while appearing to condemn it. (A propos, one remembers one of the famous films from the Lettriste avant-garde by François Dufrêne, titled Tambours du Jugement premier, 1951). What we have here is one of the historic forebears of Situationist détournement, the techniques of which Declercq applies to the society of control. Thus we see the same dynamic running from the young Marx, a pioneer of détournement, to the young Declercq, a virtuoso of simulacra capable of fooling even supposedly battle-hardened intelligence services. The most modest description of the real also constitutes its most radical critique. In this formal perspective, which responds to historical reality term for term, Declercq uses the image for its raw, elementary, effective and perverse functions, not in the field of traditional art, but in the non-aesthetic social sphere: feedback (referenced in the title of several of his actions, and of his film Feedback / Pentagon, 2003, and which is given aural expression in his work on the Larsen effect); approximation, as result of which the presence of an image is taken to mean that there is already information, thought, factual accuracy (a heritage of modern ideals) when in reality there are only archetypes, falsification, surveillance and domestication; objectification, which empties out phenomena, even denying their existence, in order to transform them into the abject contours of an identity, which is what surveillance cameras work towards.

Alain Declercq has invented an image-rich version of the opposition between official art and the practices of the avant-garde. “Embedded” artists versus “wildcats”: Declercq has transposed a term that entered public space in 2003, when it was announced that images of the second war in Iraq could be taken only by “embedded” journalists who necessarily depended logistically lead and therefore for their viewpoint on the American army. Declercq gives a precise example of a clear, simple act that clashes with the resigned, complicit passivity of the media apparatus, and thus becomes unreceivable:
“In March 2003, a few weeks after the start of American bombing of Baghdad, I took the ‘B 52’ photo in homage to Chris Burden shooting at a Boeing 747 in the middle of the Vietnam War. Coming back from England (from the U.S. base at Fairford), where the bombers were systematically rotated, I got on to all my possible contacts in the daily press to offer them this image (for free). Nobody wanted it, in spite of France’s position in all this. And yet, two months after the declaration of victory and the explicit end of acts of war, all the newspapers did publish it. The war is over: oh, really?”

Declercq speaks spontaneously in the vocabulary forged by outlaws and robbers, the bad boys who were too wise and free for this world: Antisthenes, François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, François Dufrêne, Clyde Barrow, Andreas Baader. But the German Provos and Holger Meins, who engendered him, did not leave him even the slightest revolutionary form to believe in. So what can be done now and, most of all, why do what one does? “I believe that the task of demystification is infinite, endless. That is where permanent revolution can really mean something.” Declercq’s work leaves its claw marks in the opaque running of administered time, gaps to be infiltrated by whatever critical energy we have left, without hope but without compromise.

Nicole Brenez teaches Cinema Studies at the University of Paris-1

(Panthéon-Sorbonne) and curates the Cinémathèque française’s avant-garde film

sessions since 1996. She has published Shadows de John Cassavetes (1995),

De la Figure en général et du Corps en particulier (1998), Traitement du Lumpenproletariat

par le cinéma d’avant-garde (2007) and Abel Ferrara (2007). She is the editor or co-editor

of several books, including Jeune, dure et pure. Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et

expérimental en France (2001), Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (2006). In 2009-2010 she has

produced a collective film with 45 authors, Outrage & Rebellion.