I - It is a question of putting in relation from trace to surface and from sense to support, by a series of plastic treatments, a text, and a socially connoted texture, the textile. The latter is already, before writing or painting were inscribed on its surface, the place where the continuum of signs resulting from weft and warp crossings and weave combinations, produce a specific space charged with meanings, disturbances, censures (1). A specular painting has repressed this space under layers of colour and varnish, or has redoubled it, in terms of its imagery, by the overkill of hangings, drapes, etc... (A classic method of concealing the "stolen letter"). Reference can also be made, in the text/textile issue, to certain African mythologies (cf. Marcel Griaule) for which the combination of 26 strips of fabric sets the scene for the "creation of the World".
II - The textual surface and the textile surface produced by the moving body hide, under the ideological glaze that covers them, the movement, work and agitation that underlie them. By destroying this screen, i.e. by reconsidering "reading" and "seeing" from the perspective opened up by dialectical and historical materialism (2), it is a question of restoring to the elementary gestures, crossing, weaving, marking, etc., their signifying charge, and of removing them, within the framework of a general ideological and political struggle, from the grip of commercial fetishism and reductive ideologies.
III - In such a scriptural/pictorial practice, the referent is deferred to the very scene of the signs: markings, imprints, supports, alphabetical or ideogrammatic signs, which excludes in advance any "poetic" speculation, any ideological inversion through the "camera obscura" of a transiently artistic subject.
Jean MAZEAUFROID
(1) Marx rightly points out that the surface of the fabric, its quality of fabric, obscures the movement and the actants of its process of production: "The worker has woven and the product is made of fabric". (Capital, Book I).
(2) See the introduction to "Lire le capital" by Louis Althusser (Maspéro ED.).
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