Of Sabotage in Architecture
Didier Faustino’s Anti-Projects

Far from the ignominy of nihilists’ sabotages — Souvarine’s attack in the mine at the end of Zola’s Germinal, or the fire in the aeronautics factory set by the mysterious Frank Fry at the beginning of Hitchcock’s Saboteur — the figure of the artist as saboteur is eminently seductive.¹ 1 - This text develops an idea sketched out in “Opus subversum. Didier Faustino et le Bureau des Mésarchitectures,” 20/27, no. 3, M19 (2009).  Like Dionysius who laughs as he is being dismembered, s/he is at the origin of exalting and salutary destructions. For instance the busted up instruments on the rock stages of the 1960s, or Jimi Hendrix’s burning guitar,² 2 - Julien Blanpied, “Le Bruit qui pense,” Date limite de conservation (Vitry-sur-Seine: MAC/VAL, 2009), 95-101. are destructions which are like invitations to a trance, with artists going beyond the limits imposed by materials on their practice. In the artistic domain sabotage is often a scuttling. Artists often revolt against their work conditions, against material, but also against institutions, and even their patrons, by taking positions that combine provocation and demands for creative freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Futurists — specialists in this category — initiated the “slap in the face of public taste (Mayakovski),” in the figurative and literal sense, with their glaring colours glorifying industrial production and evenings organized to degenerate into fistfights. Nowadays, in an echo to their merry ransackings, particularly as a countering of artistic institutions and museums — a call to visit the Louvre only on the Day of the Dead, the idea of filling the Venice Grand Canal with cement to turn it into a highway — the young Columbian artist Ivan Argote tags two Mondrian paintings at the Musée national d’art moderne (Paris) as he films himself in a twelve-second flash video entitled Retouch (2008).³ 3 - To view the video see his site: www.ivanargote.com.