Cultural Politics

What to Paint?

WHAT to PAINT?

Jean-François Lyotard
Interviewed by Bernard Marcadé
Translated by Kent Still and Peter W. Milne

Abstract In this interview, originally given in 1988, Jean-François Lyotard

discusses his then recently published book, Que Peindre? Adami,
Arakawa, Buren (What to Paint?: Adami, Arakawa, Buren), situating it in
the context of his broader interest in art and in terms of his insistence on
painting as “presence” or “matter.” In addition to describing the
composition and structure of What to Paint?, he links its concerns to the
problematic of presentation/unpresentability, and from there to the very
“destiny” of Western philosophy itself.
Keywords painting; presence; matter; logos

“ hat to paint?” Such is the question that Jean-François

W Lyotard poses in his latest book (published by
Éditions de la Différence). We wanted to know why the
philosopher who had imagined the exhibit Les immatériaux
[The Immaterials] at the Pompidou Center in 1985 had returned
to a question that is, after all, so simple and basic, a question
inspired by the works of Valerio Adami, Shūsaku Arakawa, and
Daniel Buren.1

Bernard Marcadé: Your latest book, from Éditions de la

Différence, is in a certain way dedicated, if not devoted, to three
contemporary artists: Adami, Arakawa, Buren. It is not the
first time that you have been interested in them. The studies,
articles, prefaces that you have written about them, or to
accompany them, have in fact served as the material for your
book. One question immediately arises: why these three

212
Cultural Politics, Volume 9, Issue 2, q artpress 1988
DOI: 10.1215/17432197-2146120

Published by Duke University Press

 Cultural Politics
painters placed side by side, juxtaposed to
this question that you turn into a title, what
to paint?
Jean-François Lyotard: It’s a question of
chance encounters. I have “chosen”
painters that I know a bit less badly than
others, whose work I’ve followed for a long
time (Buren, for example, for nearly twenty
years) but to whom I had not yet devoted a
book, as I had to Ruth Franken, Jacques
Monory, or Gianfranco Baruchello.2 I have
also chosen them because they’re located in
three fields that are completely different
from the perspective of a nomenclature or of
an art history: Adami is figurative (or passes
for it); Arakawa is more of an abstract-
conceptual painter; and Buren is an
“installation artist” who belongs to a tradi-
tion that one would have to locate more in the
realm of “minimalism.” It is therefore a
matter of three artists working in different
fields, which in itself already justifies the
question: what to paint?
BM: They are three figures of contemporary
painting . . .
JFL: They have to be taken as such. I don’t
know if they are the most eminent, but they
are each eminent in their respective fields,
even if these three fields taken together do
not cover the full range of contemporary
painting. I know that today, for example, I
would have liked to add [Karel] Appel3 in
order to expand the field and to show a little
better that, whatever the direction might be,
the essential problems are the same, despite
the fact that they receive different answers
or, more precisely, different elaborations:
whether one is mad about drawing like
Adami, about space—the cosmos—like
Arakawa, or, on the contrary, about the
critique of—we might say “museal”—
memory, like Buren . . .
Published by Duke University Press
WHAT to PAINT?
BM: Nonetheless, the choice of these
painters does not appear to be innocent?
JFL: It isn’t, and this for two reasons: first,
because they are painters that I know and
whose work I follow; second, because of
their very divergence. I wanted to conserve
what you call the side-by-side or juxtaposed
character of their assemblage because of
their heterogeneity, which it is absolutely
necessary to respect in itself and which,
moreover, renders the question mark of the
title more tangible.
The Presentable Belongs to the Representable
BM: This question mark would therefore be
the sign more of an uncertainty than of a
question?
JFL : In reality, this book does not defend a
thesis, which perhaps makes it more
troubling or even without interest! . . .
There is an uncertainty as to the way
one can “read” an oeuvre, even one as
apparently simple to decipher as that of
Adami, which displays its thematic. I think
that a simple, reassuring reading, which
would remain precisely at the thematic level,
is not sufficient, because it contents itself
with what is staged. What interests me in
him is the attempt, probably through the
singularities of his drawing (that is to say,
precisely, of his line, which is so strange), to
“hint at” something that might be said to
remain offstage, which, in a certain way,
CULTURAL POLITICS
might be said not to have taken place and
which I try to assign to what I call matter—or
presence—in the first part of the book. In a
way, Adami is the most “dangerous” of all
for the commentator, because he is the one
who seems the most modest. One does
not see the critical function of a work like this
or what purchase it gives to critique. As for
Buren or Arakawa, this seems, on the
213
other hand, to be glaringly obvious (but it is
 Cultural Politics
Jean-François Lyotard
also a way of blinding). Adami is very modest,
and I think that he is very Machiavellian.
The wisdom of sticking to the stage can only
be conquered at the price of a knowledge of
an offstage; there is, in Adami’s oeuvre, a
kind of movement toward the memory of
something that cannot not be forgotten (the
memory of an immemorial), which I call
frankness, something that would be before
all intrigue.4 Adami shows only intrigues,
but it is obvious that the very manner of
showing these intrigues, through the work of
the line in particular, aims at a beneath
[en deçà ] of the intrigue, which intrigues me.
That in Arakawa or in Buren one is
searching for a beneath of the intrigue, this is
very explicit. There is an intention in them
(even if it is impulsive or compulsive) to
open the eyes, to open up the gaze of the
beholder and, consequently, to carry it
beyond what is offered up for it to see. But in
any case, we have to make a move that
goes toward a beneath or a beyond of the
gaze, which is what I call presence, as
opposed to presentation. The presentable
belongs to the representable; there is
necessarily a destination to representa-
tion in all painting, even nonfigurative
painting.
BM: Do you mean to say that painting is
9:2 July 2013
doomed to representation?
JFL: A painting is necessarily a repre-
sentation; it is a reprise in the visible of
†
CULTURAL POLITICS
something that has been extracted from it,
that is remitted back to us as having been
extracted, which is to say, framed by
“places” (in all senses of the word) that are
favorable to the institutional vision. What
interests these painters, in this transport
from the visible to the visible by what I call
the reprise (and what [Marcel] Duchamp
calls the delay [retard ]), is what they can
214
Published by Duke University Press
transfer of the nonvisible, even when
it is overwhelmed by narration, as in
Adami . . .
BM: Your book is a kind of philosophical
dialogue—or even sometimes polylogue.
Each chapter is in fact organized around
several voices: You, He (“Presence”); She,
He, the Other, Me (“The Line”); He, She
(“Frankness”); You, He (“Anamnesis”);
East, West (“The Point”); Mr. Sceau, Mr. Sis
(“The Site”); You [formal/plural], You
[informal/singular] (“The Exposure”). It is a
question for you of varying the perspective of
your discourse each time. What is the status
of each voice, of each perspective?
JFL: The secret model—but at the same
time, like all secrets, the most exposed—is
that of [Denis] Diderot, of Rameau’s Nephew
or even Jacques the Fatalist. In the first
part, the philosopher is called “You” and the
other interlocutor, who is not a philosopher
and who upholds the thesis of presence, is
called “He.” The “You” is, by hypothesis, a
designation that circulates, since it refers
to the interlocutor, single or plural. The “You”
here designates at the same time the one
who speaks to me, the one to whom I
speak, and also a kind of community of
speaking subjects who are essentially
philosophical (sometimes accused of being
Hegelian, but who are more often on the side
of a general philosophy of difference). The
“He” is the third person, the one about
whom one speaks. I liked the paradox of
making someone speak who is designated in
the third person, since this is precisely not a
speaking person, or because his discourse
is reported. As a result, a disequilibrium
can exist between the “You,” who is in direct
speech, and the “He,” who belongs, if he
speaks, to reported discourse. Moreover, if
this is the case, it is not said who reports it!
 Cultural Politics
Is it perhaps “You”? Moreover, “You”
speaks of himself in the third person (always
saying “he”) and does not address himself to
“He,” which is normal. “He” addresses
himself, by contrast, to “You,” by saying
“you” to him, which is a paradox, except if
“You” then passes into reported speech, on
the same stage as “He.” . . . These rhetorical
paradoxes allude to common paratopics in
painting, especially contemporary painting,
and notably after Duchamp.
BM: This is not very far from the Platonic
setup [dispositif ]?
JFL: Yes, in any case, from the paradox of
education implied by the dialogical scene.
My “You” excludes my “He” in order to
show him what it is to think in the order of
difference. But the “He” addresses himself
to “You.” Does this mean that “He” attends
the meditation of “You” as a student or
spectator and that he interrupts him in order
to intervene in it? Apparently, yes—but one
can also think that the opposite is happening:
“You” is a bad student who ruminates all
alone in the back of the classroom, and
“He” tries to correct him. There is thus an
equivocity as to the respective positions of
master and student. I secretly think that it is
“He” who is the master. That being said,
there remains the thesis of presence, which
is really very difficult to uphold . . .
BM: You establish a dialogue between Mr.
Sceau and Mr. Sis in the case of Buren and
between East and West in the case of
Arakawa. Are these not part of the same
setup?
JFL: In these cases, in fact, I employ proper
names. It is a question in this instance of
different positions. For Buren, for example,
there are two types of possible readings.
One can consider his “stripes” as seals; the
Published by Duke University Press
WHAT to PAINT?
seal is itself a monogram that can have some
signification but that has most often lost it
and that holds simply as a symbol of
recognition without symbolizing something,
a sort of logo. One then considers Buren’s
material simply as a logo. . . . It is obvious that
the seal is not in space; it is not modified
by the fact that it is moved. By contrast, the
Mr. Buren who is “Sis” (and who isn’t stupid)
is someone who gives the utmost
consideration to site.5 Indeed, in the eyes of
Buren, each place demands an absolutely
singular installation, not only in space but also
in space-time. It is evident, then, that he
works on the perceptual field in its singularity
and that we are under the rule neither of
logos nor of logo! . . .
BM: As for Arakawa?
JFL: This takes me back to some of my
Japanese reading, in particular to my beloved
Dôgen, who belongs to a Zen tradition
that is particularly severe insofar as it is
particularly sensitive to the sensible. . . . The
problems here are very close to those of
medieval aesthetics. . . . Must creation be
redeemed in its sensible, sensitive, or
sensual sumptuousness?. . .There were,
mutatis mutandis, the same debates within
Zen. . . . Dôgen belongs to a school of Zen
that says: No, it’s not a question of jumping
out of the sensible; it’s a question of jumping
into the sensible. . . . There is, in Arakawa, a
respect for sensible presence. . . . But of
CULTURAL POLITICS
course this notion of presence becomes, in
his work, impalpable; it can only be
approached at the price of a renunciation and
a relinquishing of the subject. . . . So that
singularity, let’s say Duchampian (the West),
can only be obtained through a severe
ascesis (the East).
BM: From the beginning, you maintain—
215
the “You” of your setup maintains—“that
 Cultural Politics
Jean-François Lyotard
the history . . . of painting can only describe
the decline of sensory presence,” that “the
art of presence is dying out” while “the art of
deferring it [presence] is expanding”
[Lyotard 2012a: 101]. It seems that this
remark is to be linked with all that you have
articulated around “differends” and our
“postmodern condition.” Nevertheless, a
question arises: When “You” say6 that
painting is becoming thought, that today’s
artists “think much more than they see”
[113], it seems that, even as you criticize the
Hegelian position, it is always from the
viewpoint of philosophical thought that you
situate yourself. As if “ocular pleasure” [115]
had become incompatible with reflection,
as if art, for having become the place of
thought, had lost its sensible charge. Art
has only been oriented toward presence
for short periods and most of the time
phantasmatically. It seems, on the contrary,
that it has deliberately been oriented
toward thought and this since its origins,
which are not distant. In your Discourse,
Figure, you spoke of your book as a “defense
of the eye” [see Lyotard 2011: 5]; you
pointed to art as precisely that which was
unbounded, exceeding the space of
discourse. You seem today to retreat from
this position.
9:2 July 2013
JFL: I think that you have only been attentive
to what “You” said. “You” clearly deploys
the Hegelian argument of art being destined
one day to disappear in commentary, which
†
CULTURAL POLITICS
is to say, to be replaced by aesthetics. “He”
supports exactly the inverse thesis. Art on
the contrary never ceases to be displaced
before the flood, before the tidal wave, of
commentary. “He” passes from a position
which was first that of Discourse, Figure, in
saying that it is the figural that always
withdraws from the grasp of logocentrism.
He then holds that figure is a bad word, that
216
one should rather find in the visible that
Published by Duke University Press
which is not seen, for example, the form—
which allows one to see, but which is not
itself seen. In the same way, he finds that
this word too is unsatisfactory, that
[Immanuel] Kant himself realizes this in his
“Analytic of the Sublime,” that the feeling of
the sublime is precisely the one given by the
“without form.” “He” then proposes to
call this mode of presence matter. “You”
couldn’t care less about that, obviously. . . . In
the “Anamnesis” chapter, the question is
explicitly related to that of Discourse, Figure.
It is once again a matter of asking oneself
what is at stake in the art of painting. And it is,
I repeat, a matter of showing that there is
some thing that will absolutely not be seen.
I remain convinced that one cannot arrive
at this response in terms of phenomenology;
as for whether one can pass directly to the
Freudian unconscious, as I wrote in the
second part of Discourse, Figure, it’s an open
question. On the other hand, that one can,
under the name of matter, invoke a presence
that is never present, that the enigma, for
example, of a chromaticism (of a tone, a
nuance) is necessarily put forward by
painting itself—it seems to me that this is the
true stake of painting and the perpetual
failure of commentary.
BM: If one cannot be finished with
presence, it seems, according to you, that
we have finished with aesthetics?
JFL: The term aesthetic appears in the
middle of the eighteenth century, at the
precise moment that it is already doomed to
destruction due to the rise of the question of
the sublime. To say that an analytic of the
sublime is possible is to say that there is
another art, an art that would not be bound
to forms (and of which Kant says nearly
nothing, because he hastens to tip the
sublime into the domain of ethics). And in my
view this is, at the same time, to admit the
 Cultural Politics
deficiency of aesthetics, insofar as it is linked
to forms. It is not by accident that [G. W. F.]
Hegel, who defends the thesis of the disap-
pearance of art to the profit of aesthetics,
misses the sublime. . . . It is unthinkable for
speculative and dialectical thought . . .
The Western Destiny of Philosophy Is
Realizing Itself Today
BM: Just the question that I’m dying to
ask. . . . One can say that, by turning art into
the privileged perspective of his thought,
[Friedrich] Nietzsche has in a way betrayed
the cause of logos and of truth. Have you
yourself betrayed this cause? Have you
dared to take that step?
JFL: No . . . no . . .
BM: Then you remain a philosopher?
JFL: I remain a philosopher in an age in
which there is no more philosophy. On this
point, I understand the Nietzschean lesson
well: it is true that there is no more
philosophy, in the sense that metaphysics
has become impossible as a discourse, for
the simple reason that it is realized in the
contemporary world. It has become reality.
What [Martin] Heidegger calls Gestell
[enframing], what [Jürgen] Habermas calls
technoscience, what I myself have
attempted, in the name of provocation, to call
the postmodern, is the realization of
metaphysics in everyday life. Metaphysics is
a general physics, where one thinks
everything in terms of the harnessing of
energy, of total mobilization, of the setting-
to-work of energies, be they physical,
cosmological, human. . . . We are immersed
in a Leibniz without God, realized . . .
mathesis universalis [universal science].
Everything is calculated, and numbers
themselves go crazy. . . . If it is true that there
was a Western destiny of philosophy, it is
Published by Duke University Press
WHAT to PAINT?
realizing itself today. We are in a universe
that is philosophized, in the sense that there
is no more place for philosophy in the
metaphysical sense, since it is already
there. . . . It is on Wall Street; it is at the
Pentagon. . . . True metaphysics has never
been a metaphysics of the subject (we have
been quite mistaken in this regard) but a
metaphysics of forces. What’s more, it
doesn’t call itself “metaphysics” by accident.
Freud’s Metapsychology was also
a physics of the mind. In this sense, it is
obvious that I cannot continue to philo-
sophize “as if nothing had happened.” Only
problems like those of presence or matter
offer any resistance to this actualization of
the philosophico-metaphysical logos
(ontotheology, as Jacques Derrida says)—
and, in particular, resistance through the art
of painting, which is a relation to this
elusive thing, which is an emotion, a pathos,
beneath any aisthesis, any sensation. There
is something that continues to affect the
soul, which is probably very close to what
Freud calls “unconscious affect,” and which
precisely does not give rise to representa-
tion. What is in play with the great
contemporary visual artists has nothing to
do with amusing oneself with representation
and representativity (what Jean Baudrillard
would call the simulacrum: the simulacrum
of simulacrum of simulacrum. . .). One
can always say that, always show that, one
has reached a new level of meta, meta,
meta. . . which spiral out of control, what’s
CULTURAL POLITICS
more . . .
BM: This, precisely, is the Wall Street
effect?
JFL: That’s what Baudrillard says, anyway:
“booms,” “crashes,” which in the end do
not “crack up” or “boom” anything. One can
see, after the fact, that this produces no
217
effect, no upheaval. In a certain way, it’s
 Cultural Politics
Jean-François Lyotard
true . . . but only insofar as we confine
ourselves to logos. It is clear that this is not
what is at stake in the works we’ve just
spoken about or in art that questions itself.
When [Paul] Cézanne was in front of his
Sainte Victoire, he was searching neither for
simulacra nor for the surplus value of
seduction . . .
Notes
1. This interview appeared for the first time in French in
artpress (www.artpress.com) (no. 125 [1988]:
42 –45), soon after the initial publication of Que
peindre? (What to Paint? ) (Lyotard 1987). Lyotard’s
book was reissued in French in 2008 by Hermann
Éditeurs and again in 2012 in a bilingual edition as
volume 5 of Leuven University Press’s Writings on
Contemporary Art and Artists (Lyotard 2012a). All
footnotes have been added, as have the in-text
citations to works by Lyotard. Thanks to Chris Turner
for comments on an earlier draft of this translation.
2. For the texts on Franken and Baruchello, see Lyotard
2012b; for his book on Monory, see Lyotard 2013.
3. See Lyotard 2009.
4. The French word intrigue, which occurs throughout
What to Paint?, means both “intrigue” and “plot.”
See Lyotard 2012a: 119n4.
5. Sis means “located” or “situated.”
6. Marcadé here uses the second-person plural (or
formal) form, “dites,” of the verb dire (to say) and not,
as one might expect in this context, the third-person
singular, dit.
9:2 July 2013
†
CULTURAL POLITICS
Bernard Marcadé is an art critic and professor of aesthetics at the École nationale d’arts de Cergy-
218
Pontoise.
Published by Duke University Press
References
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1987. Que peindre? Adami,
Arakawa, Buren (What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa,
Buren). 2 vols. Paris: Éditions de la Différence.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2009. Karel Appel: Un geste de
couleur/Karel Appel: A Gesture of Colour, edited
by Herman Parret. English translation by Vlad
Ionescu and Peter W. Milne. Vol. 1 of Writings on
Contemporary Art and Artists. Leuven: Leuven
University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2011. Discourse, Figure.
Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2012a. Que Peindre? Adami,
Arakawa, Buren/ What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa,
Buren, edited by Herman Parret. English translation
by Antony Hudek. Vol. 5 of Writings on
Contemporary Art and Artists. Leuven: Leuven
University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2012b. Textes dispersés II:
Artistes contemporains/ Miscellaneous Texts II:
Contemporary Artists, edited by Herman Parret.
English translation by Vlad Ionescu, Erica Harris,
and Peter W. Milne. Vol. 4, bk. 2, of Writings on
Contemporary Art and Artists. Leuven: Leuven
University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2013. L’assassinat de
l’expérience par la peinture—Monory/The
Assassination of Experience by Painting—Monory,
edited by Herman Parret. English translation by
Rachel Bowlby. Vol. 6 of Writings on Contemporary
Art and Artists. Leuven: Leuven University Press.