Francis Picabia, Rosemarie Trockel, and the Idée Fixe

„If we can accept that the enigmatic is at least in some way valuable to artistic accomplishment, then we begin attempting to address what that enigma is. The two questions here are, first, what it is that artists pursue in their resistance to interpretation, and second, by what means do they resist interpretation. The answer to the first is, unsurprisingly, enigmatic. No artist knows precisely what they’re doing because artistic decisions are imprecise and instinctual, driven by a prelinguistic impulse that’s present in all but the laziest and most cynically instrumentalized artworks. It’s possible to give that impulse a name, however, which we can call the idée fixe. This is not just obsessiveness, but a specific investment in one’s artistic practice that takes the artist beyond the idée reçue, the established, conventional idea of art that characterizes contrived or otherwise uninspired forms of art. It isn’t creativity, or inspiration, or self-expression, or individual „genius“, although it isn’t entirely unrelated to any of those concepts. A sense of personal style is a sort of analogue, as is morality. Perhaps the closest comparison would be the muse if considered as the abstract force implied by the concept, removed of any romantic or mythological connotations. More loftily, it’s a term for what drives dialectical self-criticism, an outside influence that generates the artistic subject. The fundamental quality of the idée fixe that makes other terms inadequate is that it is outside of the artist and precedes them. It functions as a precursor, an intuition of something larger than oneself that leads the artist to mold their subjectivity and way of life to accommodate the possibility of realizing works of art. Naturally, it’s impossible to disentangle the contingent assemblage of coincidental influences, inherited traits, and practical considerations that go into an artist’s development, but the drive to be devoted to art’s internal logic as something immanent to itself and beyond (but not necessarily in direct opposition to) the desire for fame, money, or posterity is fueled by this preexisting force that can’t be cogently taught or acquired but also isn’t inherent to the individual. If the idée reçue delimits the space of contrived, normative, known, and/or careerist art, the idée fixe is the force that keeps artists of talent within the sphere of the enigmatic, unreconciled to the familiar and dedicated to art’s own nature. (…)“

full text:

https://manhattanartreview.com/picabiatrockel.html

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