First, the question associates celebration with a frivolous leisure activity, which is by nature guilty in the face of reasoned and responsible conduct. \u201cTo party\u201d suggests a particular manifestation\u2014to enjoy \u00adoneself, or in colloquial terms to \u201chave a blast\u201d\u2014something to which \u00adcelebration cannot, however, be reduced. For to party also means to \u00adcelebrate, notably to commemorate. There are thus two types of \u00adcelebration: if \u00adcommemoration is part of celebration, then the anniversary of the 9\/11 attacks partially includes \u201ccelebration\u201d though there is evidently nothing festive about it. If, on the one hand, festivities allow one to have fun, to get drunk, or even forget, on the other, the commemoration exists above all to make us remember. To sum up, there are celebrations where one amuses oneself, and others where one fulfils a duty to remember. But a \u00adcelebration can also be improvised outside of any public or civic framework: the feast, a dinner party washed down with plenty of wine, a night of bar hopping. This celebration has no fixed place in the calendar and can have no other meaning than that of a break based on leisure rather than \u00adworship. Contrary to celebration as a social institution, as a civic or religious event, there are also open and \u201cfree\u201d festivities\u2014in other words, there is celebration and there is the festive. Celebration includes \u00admerrymaking, but the more vague festive is in no way limited to official celebrations: it designates a behaviour, mood or atmosphere, it is the intransitive celebration that can erupt under any circumstances without need or justification. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the initial question is also not worded right, since celebration is, to a large extent, dead\u2014at least so in the secular, postindustrial Western world where it is a \u201cthing of the past,\u201d to speak sententiously like Hegel did on the subject of art, because, traditionally, it cannot be viewed without a form of transcendence that it is linked to. No matter its subject, the \u00adcelebration is inextricably bound to a cultural reference that gives it its meaning, to a worldview which it affirms and reactivates through its \u00adperiodic repetition, and the authority it exerts over all those that adhere to it. In inviting each and everyone, the celebration links the living to a particular founding or exemplary event, and unifies the community by having it commune with a value schema that transcends its immediate existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In its simplest form, the celebration thus appears as a collective ritualized transport<\/em>. One can advance the hypothesis that, for a secular, disenchanted and individualist society such as ours, the celebration has tended to become an empty form, deprived of the transcendence on which its traditional community force was based. Seized by the market, drafted by tourism and the cultural industries, packaged as a mass product, contemporary celebration is no longer onto-theophanic, for it has been debased to become a cog of consumerism. The omnipresence of the festival<\/em>, which Philippe Muray inveighed against, is perhaps the surest sign of this.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Philippe Muray, Apr\u00e8s l\u2019histoire<\/em> (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n It should come as no surprise then that many artists who focus on celebration do so under the sign of the tragic or of transgressive irony. In an untitled installation by Claude L\u00e9v\u00eaque, shown at Optica in 1993, this celebration appears to take the shape of a corpse or a wreck. In the otherwise empty gallery, glitter and confetti are strewn on the floor, paper garlands and streamers hang pathetically from the ceiling or lie about on the floor\u2014the joyous liveliness that these accessories were intended to foster is here transformed into a sad mess. <\/p>\n\n\n\n During the 1990s the French artist used the entropic form of scattered refuse to create several of these installations with their \u201cend of party\u201d atmospheres. In each case there is a deserted, chaotic, decaying space. In I Wanna Be Your Dog<\/em> (1996) party novelties, broken bottles, electric wires and microphones lie haphazardly on the floor making up a ballroom that is still lit by disco balls and animated\/punctuated by canned applause. In reference to this work Richard Leydier speaks of a \u201crave iconography that is the metaphor. . . for a melancholy \u2018no future\u2019 atmosphere.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Richard Leydier, \u201cLa petite musique de nuit,\u201d Art Press, Claude L\u00e9v\u00eaque. Le Grand Soir. Venise 2009<\/em>, supplement to issue no. 357 (June 2009): 32. [Our translation.]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Les Fermi\u00e8res Obs\u00e9d\u00e9es mix the grotesque and the misshapen into celebration so as to better deconstruct it. During the F\u00eate de l\u2019art<\/em> the four performers, dressed in their usual dirty skirts and blouses, were buried under an accumulation of streamers. In this piece entitled La f\u00eate g\u00e2ch\u00e9e<\/em>, the coloured decorations no longer invoked a healthy and fun party mood, but instead degenerated into a chaotic accumulation through an \u00adexcessive and disturbing proliferation, which threatened to bring down the entire structure. All this was further amplified by Les Fermi\u00e8res\u2019 dripping makeup, which, beneath the refined elegance of contemporary makeup, gave rise to the savage power of body painting that is at its origin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In their work Le Carnaval<\/em>, presented during the 2008 edition of Paysages \u00e9ph\u00e9m\u00e8res<\/em>, Les Fermi\u00e8res revisited another form of celebration: the procession. Both through its staging and its scale the event evoked a triumphant pageant of stars. Preceded by motorcycle police who cleared the way, the performers paraded down Mont-Royal Avenue in a shiny white convertible, throwing candies to the crowd while three cameramen captured their every gesture as paparazzi would. The procession was completed by a group of black youth waving white flags and an Italian marching band from Montreal. Here everything indicated the pomp of a large-scale celebration, yet at the same time the whole thing was imbued by a trash atmosphere, by caricature and mockery. Though children were parading enthusiastically and the marching band played for real, they were, nevertheless, incorporated into a performance that discredits the celebration and undermines its seriousness. Behind Les Fermi\u00e8res the black youth carried a large papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 mound that they exhibited like a ridiculous trophy with undeniable scatological connotations. For their part, the Fermi\u00e8res played their femmes fatales part, but dressed in \u00adsullied costumes throughout the parade, and dirtied their faces and lips with chocolate pudding when they were not using it to bask the mound. As for the white flags brandished by the black youth, they were blemished with a brown stain reminiscent of bibs: we are placed before a disfigured parade, reduced to a biting masquerade, where the magnificence of the procession is reduced to a grotesque buffoonery\u2014a misshapen \u00adcelebration, indeed. And yet, fascinated onlookers followed the procession and joined in the parade. Les Fermi\u00e8res made an attack on celebration but it proved \u00adresilient, and survived the blows and fed off the profanation that was thrown at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Affranchir suffisamment<\/em> (2005), an action by Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Prost and Marie-Suzanne D\u00e9silets, did not directly focus on celebration, but it made one reflect on its transmigration to other social \u00adactivities. For several days the two artists travelled through large suburban \u00adshopping centres with transparent balloons, bearing absurd or out-of-place \u00admessages (for instance, \u201cgratuit<\/em>\u201d), that they spread in the stores or tied to cars in the parking lots. The balloon was here diverted from its \u00adfestive function; in its transparency it was stripped of its colours and lost its merry overtones. It was more a source of bafflement than amusement. Through the unease or confusion it at times caused among shoppers this infiltration in megastores actually revealed to what point frequenting these complexes is like a ritual, as if consuming were a tacit celebration that is unaware of itself, but made palpable precisely through the interruption and distancing Desilets and Prost perpetrate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artists can also tackle the opening\u2014this celebration specific to the art world\u2014by harnessing its energy or administering it with an electroshock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Picabia was suffering from ophthalmic shingles that prevented him from painting, he invited the guests of his \u201cr\u00e9veillon cacodylate<\/em>\u201d\u2014new year\u2019s eve party\u2014to write whatever crossed their minds on his \u00adcanvas, thus turning his painting into the emanation and precipitate of the \u00adcelebration. L\u2019\u0153il cacodylate<\/em> is effectively covered by signatures and notes which translate the wildness of the party through the imaginativeness and variety of their inscriptions. In a different vein, when the Argentinean Graciela Carnevale sequestered viewers by locking them up in the gallery during the opening of her Ciclo de Arte Experimental, on October 8, 1968, it is the opening itself as a situation that was seized upon and subverted in a decidedly more political vein. The momentary captivity inflicted by the artist on her viewers not only spoiled the party but also sought to make them aware of the violent control exerted by the dictatorship in power at the time: don\u2019t count on the artist for your \u201cescape\u201d from reality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The situation orchestrated by the QQistes in Le luxe du vernissage<\/em> at the Centre d\u2019art Amherst in 2005, seemed more perverse, and more compromising for the visitor. The opening as social event\u2014documented by photographs\u2014here became the main attraction of the subsequent exhibition. It was about \u201ctaking the opening as a high-society event and turning it into a burlesque and flamboyant happening. For three hours, visitors were invited to a powwow in the presence of dwarves, a mascot, a transvestite, a third-degree burns victim, a homeless person (a real one) and a motley crew of various characters. There was a subscription counter for a hunting and fishing magazine, a giant cake from which a pretty girl emerged, a painter using an airbrush to paint caricatures and a kitsch \u00adbuffet that combined every conceivable clich\u00e9 about Quebecois cold cuisine.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Aseman Haghsheno-Sabet, \u201cDialogue avec les QQistes,\u201d Espace<\/em>, no. 77 (Fall 2006): 24. Also see, Manon Tourigny \u201cCeci n\u2019est pas une plaisanterie: l\u2019irr\u00e9v\u00e9rence chez les QQistes,\u201d esse<\/em>, no. 56 (Winter 2006): 44-47.<\/span> <\/sup> This description of the event bears witness to the QQistes\u2019 taste for kitsch and humour. But, above all, the artists took pleasure in undermining the codes of contemporary art openings to disconcert the viewer, which the evening\u2019s photographs showing visitors\u2019 expressions of surprise, amusement or unease, testify to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another approach would be to seek transport rather than irony, in an attempt to reinvent celebration and restore its power. The feasts to which Massimo Guerrera periodically invites the public during his Darboral <\/em>presentations are a telling example of this. Bringing together sculptures, sketch books, photographs, food, plants and other elements, Darboral <\/em>is primarily about doing and living through the manipulation of objects, tasting and the encounters that they bring about and which nourish its creation. This work in progress thus supports the very theme of the work (an active reflection on the opening and porosity of beings and bodies, the resistances to the Other, etc.), which grows in an altogether organic manner thanks to these gatherings. The referent here is no longer extrinsic to the work, and the celebration is less an end than the product of the artistic activity itself and its reception. It is actually not surprising that a nostalgia for celebration can be inversely diagnosed in relational or participative practices, since many of them, to a greater or lesser degree, seek to restore community and being in the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The phenomenon we have just described in regards to Darboral<\/em> is no doubt closer to the festive than to celebration strictly speaking. If the vernissage<\/em> turns out to be one of the circumstances that is most \u00adconducive to the emergence of the festive, it can also occur when people get together and a break with the ordinary is created. And it is no doubt through the spark of the festive that artists are rekindling celebration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If celebration is a collective ritualized transport, the festive for its part has cast off the prescriptive ritual and the civic, religious, \u00adcommemorative references that defined it. In art it is becoming manifest in the various \u00adconvivial and enthusiastic atmospheres that are \u00adgenerated by the \u201c\u00adrallying\u201d contexts such as creative symposia, art events, and even street theatre, which unfolds the stage and extravaganza of festive \u00addisguise directly within the urban fabric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is in this spirit that the activities of Pique-nique, an informal collective of Montreal artists who, once a year, leisurely occupy a given city public park to present sculptures and actions. One group of \u00adaccomplices, \u00adwearing red T-shirts, was directed by Edouard Pretty to mimic a mobile guard of honour which moved and reformed around astonished \u00adpassers-by who were warmly applauded; another (Patrick B\u00e9rub\u00e9) caused a fake park bench to rise in the air, much to the surprise of onlookers; yet another (Thierry Marceau), a credible cross between a guru and a Club Med GO (Gracious Organizer), invited the crowd to Beaver Lake to join in a \u00adimprovised tai-chi session with karaoke background sounds.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - For more on the collective\u2019s actions see: Julie B\u00e9lisle, \u201cQuand faire c\u2019est dire: l\u2019acte artistique dans l\u2019espace urbain\u201d, esse<\/em>, no. 54 (Spring\/Summer 2005): 52-55.<\/span> The force of this formula paradoxically resides in the unpretentiousness fostered by physical proximity and a laid-back attitude in which the passers-by and strollers unexpectedly gather to discover unannounced and \u00adunexpected works and activities, emerging spontaneously here and there along A similar group activity is evident in the visual jumble of the C.L.O.M.-Trok<\/em> monochromes organized by Jo\u00ebl Hubaut, who invited the citizens of Deauville (France) to bring a red object to a public place at a set hour (La Place rouge \u00e0 Deauville<\/em>, 1996). This kind of hare-brained idea \u00adanticipated the flash mob phenomenon, where new technologies and \u00adcollective bodily presence embody another sort of virtual community in urban space. Contrary to events organized by cultural industries, flash mobs are \u00adinitiated by users themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If it appears the we are moving further and further away from celebration in its familiar sense, this more diffuse understanding allows us to distinguish the multifaceted effervescence of the festive precisely when it emerges in circumstances where it is neither foreseen nor sought after, where no spectacular or particular event calls for it or seeks to \u00adproduce it\u2014and where it is so much the more \u201ctransporting\u201d and \u00adauthentic because it is entirely unpredictable, and given and received freely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, the festive emerges in spontaneous gatherings \u00adtriggered by some of the Hypoth\u00e8ses d\u2019insertion<\/em> by the SYN- artist \u00adcollective, notably during the improvised excursions they undertook in 2007 with a \u00adwheel-mounted football table in the multi-ethnic Parisian 18th arrondissement. Of course the project draws on the \u00adfamiliarity of this game for a European public as well as the \u201crallying\u201d virtues of \u00adsoccer, \u00adsomething made manifest by the spontaneous manner in which \u00adpassers-by joined in the game and the diversity of groups which gathered around it (mixing youth and the elderly, immigrants of various origins, and Parisian and French \u201cnatives\u201d). By creating an unusual circumstance outside of any instituted event, the artists harnessed the collective enthusiasm triggered by the game and leisure sport to produce a break with everyday order: having become mobile the football table moved from the bistro to the street, where it brought strangers momentarily together thanks to the happenstance nature of pedestrian traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This fortuitous festive provides another image of celebration: an \u00adevanescent and sporadic, but powerful celebration, precisely because of its unpredictability as well as its capacity to rebound suddenly and to thereby create precarious interstices of euphoria, of fragile collective transport. One could interpret the relation of the celebration in light of Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s molar\/molecular6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari, tr. Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 229-256.<\/span> opposition, and as a form of everydayness as defined by Maffesoli7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Among other things see his essay La conqu\u00eate du pr\u00e9sent: pour une sociologie de la vie quotidienne<\/em> (Paris: Descl\u00e9e de Brouwer, 1998). <\/span> : on an everyday level one can oppose a diffuse and impromptu effervescence to the mass events programmed by the state or the cultural industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From a customary, instituted celebration, we have progressively moved to an immaterial, unpredictable and ephemeral celebration. Curiously, this has led us to \u201cundefine\u201d celebration, to liberate it from its structure, mooring and specific space-time. It hence tends to dissolve in the festive, to merge with any circumstance where the momentary fervour of a joyous atmosphere glitters, even when the celebration disappears within life at large and is revealed almost as a \u201ctotal social fact,\u201d analogous to the gift omnipresent in Mauss\u2019 famous analysis.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Marcel Mauss, tr. Ian Collinson, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies<\/em> (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954).<\/span> It indeed seems that certain artistic practices work to open up such interstices, as though to relaunch and revive the being-together of public space.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - But not only art: see citizen movements such as Reclaim the Street or initiatives such as the one the CCA presented with the exhibition Actions: What You Can Do With the City.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n A survival of the festive, in which art also takes part, would thus be the response to the decline of celebration. Contemporary \u00adcelebration emerges and surprises us\u2014we were no longer preparing it. Neither \u00adtranscendence nor death of god, from now on simply the acuity of the present and the celebrated here and now, which will delight us for a brief instant, before leaving, before the disaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Bernard Sch\u00fctze<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/67_DO04_Loubier_Leveque_I-wanna-be-your-dog-scaled.jpg\")
I wanna be your dog<\/em>, 1996.
SODRAC (2009)
Photo: Denis Farley, courtesy of the artist & kamel mennour, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/67_DO04_Loubier_Leveque_Sans-titre-fin-de-fete-scaled.jpg\")
[Sans titre | Untitled]<\/em>, 1993.
SODRAC (2009)
Photo: Denis Farley, courtesy of the artist & kamel mennour, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/67_DO04_Loubier_Fermieres-obsedees_fete-gachee-2.jpg\")
La f\u00eate gach\u00e9e<\/em>, 2003.
Photos\u202f: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/67_DO04_Loubier_Fermieres-obsedees_fete-gachee.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/67_DO04_Loubier_Prost_Affranchir-suffisamment-scaled.jpg\")
Affranchir suffisamment<\/em>,
Manif d’art 3, Qu\u00e9bec, 2005.
Photo: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThe Opening as Celebration<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Festive as Emergence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
their way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/67_DO04_Loubier_Banc-public-aerien-scaled.jpg\")
Banc public a\u00e9rien<\/em>, 2004.
Photo: Julie Villeneuve<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n