Pierre Menard

the visitor

2008-10-28T11:10:00.001-07:00

acrylic on canvas, 2008, 30x30 cm

study for portrait of Spanish Prince

2008-08-29T07:47:00.001-07:00

pencil on paper, 29.5x42 cm

woman of Odd (detail)

2008-03-03T10:30:00.001-08:00

pencil on paper, 29x42 (paper size)

Launching of the Center for Fictitious Art

2008-03-01T02:17:00.000-08:00

Center for Fictitious Art

The Center for Fictitious Art is dedicate to the theory and practice of art and the reflection on the structures and the workings of the cultural sphere in our contemporary world. Art that looks like “art” but may indeed not be so, is a matter that may generate discomfort for the lay person. Rather than simply to oppose “appearance” or “illusion” and the "real", we at CFA do not believe that the subject of Fictitious Art can't be reduced to a confrontation between, on one hand “genuine” art and on the other “error” or “deception”. Also, Fictitious Art is not simply “bad art” passing as “good”. It may well be no art at all. But then again, it may be that Fictitious Art, examined objectively, without preformed conceptions, received ideas, and unconscious prejudices, will end up revealing the “fictional”, that is imaginary, illusory, self-deceptive nature of all art and of human experience in general.

The Center for Fictitious Art, celebrates the ambiguities, uncertainties, fallibility and gullibility of our human condition. Indeed we believe that, for reasons that have to do with structural needs of present day globalized market economy, and are apparently too “complex” to be discussed here, the refusal, inability or unwillingness to decide between conflicting explanations, ideas, values and forms of action, the practical embracing of contradictions while explicitly rejecting them, both in the institutional domains that structure our world and in everyday life, is at the core of what has been called the “post-modern condition”. It is an important element of the cultural identity of our time, a time that wants proudly to transcend the impasses and errors of the past by denying that there ever was a problem in the first place.

Pierre Menard, Director

coming soon: Website of the Center for Fictitious Art, programs and projects

Self portrait as a Dutch Baroque Painter

2007-12-04T10:00:00.001-08:00

"Pierre Menard- Self portrait as a Dutch Baroque Painter",
pencil on paper, 29 x 42 cm

"Portrait of Pierre Menard by Carolus Hourcade"

2007-11-14T06:29:00.001-08:00

"Portrait of Pierre Menard by Carolus Hourcade", pencil on paper, 29x42 cm

Study for Portrait of Spanish Prince

2007-11-13T18:51:00.001-08:00

Pierre Menard, Study for Portrait of Spanish Prince, goauche on paper

Exquisite corpse

2007-11-12T05:53:00.001-08:00

Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau

A recent drawing in collaboration with artists Tony Wright and Marcelo Lima
link: Le cadavre exquis project

A biographical note

2007-11-12T01:44:00.000-08:00

Pierre Menard was born Pedro Menardo in the small town of Benjamin Constant, in the Amazon Region in Brazil, a frontier town on the Javari River, bordering Peru and Colombia. Episodes of his youth in the jungle region were fictionalized by Colombian author and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (a “roman a la clef”: the mythical Macondo is said to be a fusion between Marquez’s Colombian home town and the town of Benjamin Constant in Brazil). Menard had met Marquez in Cuba in the late 1960s.

Menardo became Menard after living in France for several years. Due to his love for French culture, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion to have access to French nationality, but was expelled after a few years of valuable service, for his activism for Human Rights and the rights of minorities. He later met Foucault, but refused to collaborate with the French philosopher due to philosophical disagreements and above all to Foucault’s support for the Islamic Revolution of Khomeini in Iran. Instead he was a close collaborator of film maker and poet Isidore Isou. But again, disagreements over matters of literary theory prevented Menard’s name being mentioned in the literature of Lettrisme. With Guy Debord he founded the Situationist International and collaborated for a while in many of the experimental films of the author of The society of the spectacle, a book that was in part a product of long discussions on politics and philosophy between the situationists and Menard. He met briefly with Borges in Buenos Ayres before the military coup of 1974.

He lives and works nowadays between Latin America, Spain and the Middle East.

The Mimetic Manifesto by Pierre Menard

2007-11-11T23:36:00.000-08:00

The Mimetic Manifesto

The fundamental human fact is that of memory
Everything that happens, happens by contact
Trace, imprint, genes, memes, what exist, exists by replication
From the Microcosm to the Macrocosm
From physical processes to biological processes
Matter organizes itself and life by copying
By repetition
The fundamental fact not just of Life but of the Universe as it exists and persists from the
so-called "Big-Bang" ( this scientific myth of an absolute beginning that, as we know now, was not the beginning) to today
Conscious replication is what distinguishes the very fact of human memory
Without mimesis there is no history and no identity and therefore no language and no culture
Even intelligent machines are only so because they mimic, us at first, themselves later
Against the post modern abolition of time and memory
Against collective amnesia and self-willing ignorance
Against digitalized imbecility
Against the false innocence of those who celebrate a time without dimensions
Without future because without past
Against the reification of an impoverished present
Against the closed circuit of unconscious tautology
Against post-media aesthetics
Against the technological illusion and the demise of human responsibility
We proclaim a return to the mimetic in the arts and in the culture
Artists of today need to know who their real parents are instead of believing naively in parthenogenesis
Against the illusion of self-generation which is in fact:
the fear of the Other, the fear of the Many, the forgetting of the Dyad
Against Platonic Monism
Mimesis is conscious selection
It reintroduces the arrow of time within the prison of the a-temporal
Our credo can be simply and clearly stated by replicating the great Isidore Isou, father of Lautreamont: "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it!"
Plagiarism: conscious selection, creative, artistic memory in action!
From now on all art will be Mimetic again, or will not be!

Pierre Menard, 2007