An astounding number of songs remind me of Tony, whose practice includes DJing as a space for artistic expression. I often see him dancing in my head, as I have so often observed him, taking on the dirty dancing of the 60s, having fun with heteronormative codes and sometimes turning me into Baby. The world of the night, of discotheques, of burlesque shows, of dancehalls have always inhabited his works, from the most minimal ones as soon as he graduated, to the most explicit or figurative. But this is not a vocabulary to be appropriated for charming artistic experiments. And if I refer to Tony’s night life, it is because he does not appropriate a universe that is external to him; there is a continuity between his life and his work. I am lucky enough to have been both a character in this universe and the curator of several of his exhibitions, and it is in these capacities that I take the floor today for his first retrospective catalogue.

I hope that this position will allow me to avoid the pitfall pointed out by Maggie Nelson in On Freedom, of a moralising writing about art that functions in the form of predicates. Artists are thus sickened to hear their work subsumed under abstract concepts that posit practice as a unidirectional element of enunciation, where the work necessarily escapes any attempt at ideological reduction. “When I write about art, I try to keep in mind the urge to vomit. I try to imagine approaches that are neither moralising nor nauseating, knowing that we all have our hobbyhorses (“openness”, “nuance”, “context”, “indeterminacy”, as far as I am concerned¹ ). I try to keep in mind the body of the artist —what they feel, what they want, what they are compelled to try— while remembering that failure —aesthetic or otherwise— is an integral part of the process. […] There is a difference between turning to art in the hope that it will reify a belief or value that was our own and rise up if it contradicts it, and turning to art to see what it does, what happens in it, seeing it as a space in which to discover “the unusual and tangible communiqués of the thinking and feeling of others around us”, as Eileen Myles² once said.” I have always been a strong supporter of Eco’s open work, which is in line with Rancière’s definition quoted by Nelson: the work ends in the feelings of the viewers and thus its meaning can never be fixed. This led me, like Tony, to choose to work in arts outreach, because knowing more about art and artists also meant being on the side of reception, where the work ends temporarily, before continuing its journey towards the senses of another spectator.

In the multifaceted career of Tony Regazzoni, artist, DJ as mentioned before, there are also the hats of curator and facilitator. It was in this capacity that I first met him, at the Crédac in 2007, and his interest in transmission, pedagogy, and therefore in all the rituals of art, is an integral part of his artistic process. I have already written about the importance of rituals in his work, particularly that of celebration and transgression, for the Celebration exhibition at the Palais Ducal in Nevers as part of the Parc Saint Léger - Hors les murs, or for the La Caverne exhibition at the Galerie ACDC in Bordeaux. Whether he is erecting polystyrene menhirs or reproducing a global trust of a theatre, the artist identifies the structures of modern rituals and their tools. The reproduction of a megalithic monument for Celebration refers not only to its esoteric origin but also to its modern double, which can be found in amusement parks or tourist museography. Like Rampe, it emphasises the importance of the technical tool at the heart of the device of mystification. Artifice is obviously not shown as a fake opposed to the original, but as a component of the production of reality to be integrated and enhanced. Stonehenge is no more authentic than the resin glaciers in the Brest aquarium, which are themselves no more or less real than the artist’s representations. According to Clément Rosset in Le réel et son double (The Real and its Double), which I often quote, “We can thus distinguish between three major ways in which an artist practices artifice: according to whether they want to be artificial out of disgust with nature seen as disappointing (naturalist practice), out of nostalgia for an absent nature (quasi-artificialist practice), or out of pleasure at the absence of nature (artificialist practice) […]. Through the different practices of artifice, it is reality in general that appears to be denied, tolerated, accepted.” Here, the artist belongs to the last category. Accepting reality, the way Tony Regazzoni does, a very psychoanalytical posture if ever there was one, leads him to pamper the crack of modern humanity, the need to annex the past and Nature into itself, while still considering them as other, or external. Umberto Eco in La Guerre du Faux brilliantly describes the overflow produced by the need to incorporate what has disappeared: “A legend tells us that there is an eighteenth-century painting of Peter Stuyvesant, of which a European museum with didactic concerns allegedly exhibits a good reproduction: instead, the New York museum shows a three-dimensional statuette about thirty centimetres high which reproduces Peter Stuyvesant as he was in the painting; except that in the painting, of course, we saw Peter only from the front or from a three-quarter view, whereas here we see him in his entirety, and we even see his behind. […]” The museum Eco describes will complete the absence, because “ the original is now damaged, almost invisible, unable to give you the emotion you felt in front of the three-dimensional wax, which is more real and ‘there’s more of it’” ³ ]. It is the same mechanism, this time in the relationship with nature, that is at work in the work of Piero Gilardi, a major 20th century artist and an important reference for Tony and me. With the production of the Tapis-nature (nature-carpets), Piero Gilardi is looking for a non-painful nature, in which to roll around without splinters or scratches, without irritating sand, and not far from the light switch to avoid being in the dark, and from the kitchen to go and boil water for tea. It is of course, about integrating the idea of technical progress to the idea of Nature with that of comfort, a popular notion par excellence. The result is grandiose, sometimes outrageous works, like Inverosimile with its dancing vines, sometimes very simple like the pebble-shaped pouffes. Tony Regazzoni’s latest works are clearly situated in this connection, a pleasure in the overflow filling the crack left by the violence of reality. The paintings represent pyrographed motor vehicles in front of sculptures of motorways, which sometimes counterfeit archetypal historical elements (as do the discotheques that are very present in the artist’s work: columns, arches…). But the works are also practical: coat racks, clocks, ashtrays… like decorative objects found at Gifi or La Foir’Fouille (Translator’s note: cheap house supply shops in France), which people from a background that is too privileged in terms of financial or cultural capital will not be able to recognise. The presentation text for the exhibition evokes the “God of progress […] A god with Promethean dreams particularly embodied in objects as ordinary as cars and telephones –both symbols of emancipation from the limits of space and time”. These same spatial-temporal limits are crossed by what Eco calls falsification, reproducing, and mixing elements of different cultural origin, interweaving pasts and territories, and “falsifications of falsification” rendering indistinct the so-called original from the so-called copy, or interpretation, in a move opposed to the classifying spirit of art history. But where Eco can write of American museums “Elsewhere the spasmodic desire for the Almost True is born simply of a neurotic reaction to the emptiness of memories: the Absolute False is the son of the unhappy consciousness of a present with no depth”, Regazzoni’s works know where to look for and find the depth of a time made up of several sedimented layers. For example, Regazzoni composes old, outdated technological revolutions in his posters in a staging of “reparative fiction”: the queer or racialised characters extolling the virtues of the inventions had no media existence at the time of these technical innovations, the 1980s and 1990s in France being very exclusively and violently heterosexual and white. Here, the term “reparative fiction”, borrowed from Emilie Notéris⁴ , consists in filling the crack, the gaping void of a classist, sexist, and racist society, with excessive, colourful, exuberant forms. The word could also be applied to the works described above which, by highlighting the tutelary figures of a proletarian and middle-class culture, seek to make them part of the history of art, just as in their time the painters of still life or scenes from the life of the people sought to penetrate the bourgeoisie through the life of the world.

The techniques used by Tony Regazzoni are sometimes reminiscent of the domestic and the amateur (woodcarving, pyrography…), sometimes of entertainment and funfairs (polystyrene sculpture, spray paint…), sometimes of classical art using paint on canvas or wood, a process from his beginnings that he seems to be abandoning little by little, but which we see again in his latest solo show with the creation of trompe-l’oeil marble. Regazzoni’s polymorphous practice, ranging from performance to installation, painting, sculpture, video, and DJ set, turns like a disco ball in our heads to question a certain aesthetic categorisation and to record resolutely popular images in the history of art. Here, I use the term “popular” in the sense of “common”, of elements that gather and thus acquire a form of popularity. Regazzoni’s work is far from an aesthetic of kitsch, amusing itself by shocking the bourgeoisie or looking at the authenticity of the working classes with a Pasolinian fascination. It is a question of breaking down limits and categories. The remarkable remake of “Hélène et les garçons” is a striking example: there is a genuine love for the typical forms of the sets that have shaped our adolescence, while at the same time being struck by the critical distance that, while it puts its object in perspective, does not pose as external to it. The performance brings together the three main female characters, Hélène, Johanna and Cathy, played here by the drag queen/king trio, Babouchka Babouche, Gio Ventura and Schlagazza la Casse. Tony Regazzoni stages the original text, as one would a classical play, but also in the manner of a ready-made where the gap in the appearance of the object (here the sitcom) is enough to reveal its structuring power. The violence of AB Productions’s text, which has lulled a whole generation of teenagers, is counterbalanced by a song game, which reinforces the effect of identification and nostalgia. The artist accepts the emotional aspect of the series and refuses to opt for a distanced and analytical position. This allows him to replay the mechanisms of exclusion at work in the original for the viewers: to feel both caught up in and seduced by something that rejects, offends, and humiliates us. The result is at once terrifying, enjoyable, and deeply moving. The reappropriation of the tools of systemic violence for a distorted and restorative use is a mechanism well known in queer and feminist circles. Sharing Eve Sedgwick’s thinking, Nelson tells us the following: “looking at the ‘most fruitful restorative practices’, both our own and others, Sedgwick argues, allows us to discover ‘the multiple ways in which beings and communities find a source of support from the objects of a culture […] that nevertheless goes out of its way to not support them.”⁵

As I often say, objectivity means being on the side of the object. Tony Regazzoni always avoids a disembodied relationship with the objects and rituals he identifies. He sometimes becomes an extension of them through active participation. So, he invests himself intimately in his works, which constantly challenge pre-established norms. His whole body of work follows a questioning of a classist relationship to the popular and the promotion of a class identity, but also a questioning of the usual boundaries between the internal and external fields of art history. The efficiency of the integration into the artistic field of codes that are at first glance external to it draws its strength from the artist’s circulation between his different statuses. Thus, the complete “Boîte de nuit” work at the Centre Pompidou combines several of them: artist, DJ and facilitator. Designed for teenagers, the totally immersive work invites them to dance as well as to paint on the walls or on themselves, driven by the gestures and presence of the artist, who comes out from behind the decks to put on the mask of the initiator. He then guides everyone’s gestures to handle the phosphorescent make-up intended for the walls as well as for the faces. Naturally, the bodies move framed by the replicas of replicas, colonnades, triangles, or other vestiges, which can be found in most of his works. The shifting between the different figures he embodies creates passages between the overly closed partitions of domains that are too distinct, mixing their own rituals to create new ones. Several of his works allegorically explain his interest in portals or other gates that allow one to move between different worlds or levels of reality, thus circulating between the codes of different universes.

The mix of genres active in Regazzoni’s work is a strong trend in current art, which invites us to use the body and to think of ourselves first as singular subjects, in a situated practice, as opposed to modern universalism. The current craze for Regazzoni’s work thus reveals an important movement in 2020s contemporary art, particularly in France. Of course, the questioning of the rituals of art and the desire to produce new forms mixing art, dance, education, and media continues historical practices such as those of feminist Judy Chicago or committed artists such as General Idea or Felix González-Torres, from whom Regazzoni directly draws inspiration. However, according to Grant H. Kester, the art world, and particularly art criticism, marked by the functioning of October magazine and the ousting of Douglas Crimp, had been focused since the 1990s on its own reality, oblivious to an economic and social⁶ context. Kester attacks the type of art criticism that perceives practice only as an act of unveiling a reality, but a masked and obscure unveiling that must above all respect the autonomy of the work and distinguish itself from other forms of culture, and in particular from so-called popular culture.⁷ For Kester, any other practice was disqualified as kitsch or propaganda. In fact, from the 1980s onwards, the protest aspect of contemporary art was softened, and institutional criticism was institutionalised and integrated into the functioning of structures. The artist Clémence de Montgolfier, analysing media representations of art on television, notes: “We are therefore witnessing […] a sort of reversal of the cultural hierarchy assigned to contemporary art in the cultural field, while up until the late 1970s it was represented as a protest against the established order, and nowadays it is frequently denounced, on the contrary, as a form of dominant high culture reserved for the elite, sometimes as the paroxysm of the dominant culture”.⁸ Contemporary art conveys an image in which the representation of so-called popular practices is only tolerated under the guise of a saving distance, rid of their emancipatory potential. But above all, the children of the proletarian or middle classes seem to be able to get in only by accepting the codes of the bourgeoisie, the absolute dominant force in the milieu. The claim to belong to or to have come from a world steeped in codes other than those of the bourgeoisie changes the situation. From being inappropriate to being possible, it became valued. The practice of artists such as Tarek Lakhrissi, Sara Sadik or Tony Regazzoni shows us that breaking out of these codes considerably widens the field of artistic experimentation and that the work gains from not being separated from life. Of course, some will consider that this is just another distortion of popular codes by the market and consequently by the bourgeoisie. I don’t share this pessimism, especially because I don’t think it’s fair to reduce the art world to the market; the evolution of the art world in its broader sense, which includes other points of contact than galleries and large institutions, is undeniable. The movement is of course also taking place in the critical field. Simultaneously, the return of biographical elements in the reading of the work, inseparable from a situated reflection, is gaining significance in the critical discourse. It is not a question of psychoanalytical interpretation, as has been the tradition. Critical discourse verbalises the artist’s personal investment in their work, their biographical and cultural journey. The use of “I” by theorists reinforces this tendency which, far from aiming at cultural relativism, seeks to make a thought significant and material. The contribution of visual, postcolonial and gender studies has been undeniable in overcoming the discarnate Kantian dogma. Because knowledge is not disembodied and ponderous, as shown by the “meta-work” Je sors ce soir, to use Clémence Agnez’s expression, which combines analytical deconstruction and formal excess. There is no need to choose between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the singular that frames and the universal that overflows, and vice versa. Pleasure is neither born nor disappears with knowledge, it is concomitant with it.

Therefore, to return to the body, to the stories of bodies that are told in cultural objects, and thus inevitably return to erosion, loss, disappearance. The importance of ritual is always there, in the exhaustion of shaking one’s head in all directions to swallow one’s tears, of shaking one’s muscles until the burning swallows the screams. Then we dance… It is not surprising that both discotheques and eclipses are particularly used by the artist. These immersive experiences freeze space-time in an exceptional present that seems, at that moment, eternal, breaking up with the temporal continuum that is always outstretched towards the end. These forms become symbols of eternity, but of a fictitious eternity, known and appreciated as such, replaying the pact of fiction, except that each person is consciously their own dupe, both author and reader, before and behind the screen. Guillaume Dustan’s “Je ne vieillirai jamais” (I will never grow old), displayed in the exhibition Je sors ce soir (I’m going out tonight) directed by Tony Regazzoni, sums up this duality. But this duality is not a real illusion, it is a chosen chimera, an elegance. There is nothing to be revealed, no veil to be lifted, contrary to the logic of a work that comes to awaken the spirits. As Nelson reminds us, quoting Rancière, “Art is emancipated and emancipating when […] it stops wanting to emancipate us.”⁹ Everything is already there. For me, the strength of Regazzoni’s work also lies there, in his awareness of his own emptiness and thus in his humility. In any case, statues die too:

n this fake ancient Rome
Our souls crumble like the stucco
That adorns the alcoves, rock effect
And the movements of your ass roll

All is consumed by the heat,
The multiple layers of the false ceilings
Ooze and bead like sweat
Reflecting the lasers on your forehead

My blood is in flames: burning my veins
Climbing the stairs, climbing the ecstasy
In the maze of smoke
My body is sinking through you

The beats rustle from the infra bass
The minutes beat, my heart in a box
The night, the ultimate one, and the chemistry
Gets turned on in the watts

This ultimate night is a wreckage
Of senses turned on by the laws
Of attraction of our images
Vibrated on MDMA
The last night, the ultimate journey
I want to spend it with you
In the ruins of your landscape
The statues die again

L’ultima notte e e e e e e e e e e e e
L’ultima notte e e e e e e e e e e e e¹⁰