Her unique voice, long familiar to the listeners of France Culture, could only describe itself in a paradoxical way: all together fluty and warm, slender and deep, she immediately distinguished it, like her abundant, heterogeneous, constantly unexpected work , set him apart from his first book, resulting from his thesis, The Monster in Western Art (Klincksieck, 1973). The philosopher of art, academic, writer, essayist, critic, collector and pataphysician Gilbert Lascault died on December 19 in Paris. He was 88 years old.
His parents, when he was born in Strasbourg on October 25, 1934, were hardware dealers in Obernai (Bas-Rhin). If, after a war notably marked by the absence of his father, a prisoner in Germany, he quickly shirks their desire to pass on the family business to him – he obtains the philosophy aggregation in 1960 –, he will sometimes claim this hardware ancestry to define his relationship to art and literature. Turning to one of the rare portraits devoted to this man who was so eloquent in talking about others and so parsimonious about himself, he declared in 2008 to the journalist from the “Monde des livres” who had come to visit him in his Paris apartment, where he pile up the most diverse works: “My place looks like a chaotic hardware store. Paintings, sculptures, photographs encourage me to think a little, to dream, to write (…). I transform my rooms. »
As a tribute to this way of transforming bric-a-brac into an art of living, and life into a whirlwind, it is moreover under the title “The haunted rooms of Gilbert Lascault” that the museum of the Hospice Saint -Roch, in Issoudun (Indre), organized a major retrospective exhibition in 2014 (the catalog of which was published by Tarabuste). There were some of the contemporary artists who marked his work and, for some, invaded the walls of his apartment – Bang Hai Ja, Henri Cueco, Jean Dubuffet, Christian Jaccard, Annette Messager, Henri Michaux, Jean-Luc Parant, Brigitte Tartiere, Vladimir Velickovic…
“Inventing a fictional approach”
Professor of aesthetics and philosophy of art at Paris-Nanterre and then at the Sorbonne, Gilbert Lascault studied them all, dreamed them up, reinvented them throughout what he called “uncertainty seminars”in a teaching that he wanted at the antipodes of the spirit of the system. “I try to invent a fictional, paradoxical, contradictory approach (…), he said to the “World of Books”. I enter colorful labyrinths of reflection (…), where uncertainty, vagueness and shadow reign in their own way. »
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