Doux comme saveur: at the Centre Pompidou the multimedia work of Gianfranco Baruchello

Beginning Oct. 25, 2024, the complete edition of Doux comme saveur, a multimedia project by Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924 - Rome, 2023), is on display for the first time at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in the special room of the Espace des Collections. The exhibition, which runs from Oct. 26, 2024 to March 10, 2025, is part of the initiatives promoted by the Baruchello Foundation to celebrate the centenary of Baruchello’s birth. The work includes some 24 hours of interviews conducted by the artist himself with philosophers, writers and psychoanalysts, including Noëlle Châtelet, David Cooper, Félix Guattari, Alain Jouffroy, Pierre Klossowski, Gilbert Lascault and Jean-François Lyotard, as well as with immigrant workers, confectioners from the confectionery industry and museum educational managers.

The project is exhibited in the form of a multi-screen video installation and will be accompanied by the original book in a single copy. The volume, composed of collages of notes, photographs, drawings and clippings of printed materials, was made and distributed by Baruchello, in photocopied and summarily bound form, to the participants involved in the project.

The book, the result of an assemblage of archival materials and handwritten notes, marked the beginning of a series of reflections that developed in total freedom, without constraints or predetermined parameters. This absence of limits allowed the artist to address personal themes and explore the dimensions of the dream, the repressed and the unconscious. Beginning with the “sweet taste,” understood uniquely by each interviewee, the conversation led by Baruchello developed on various topics, such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, art and the confectionery industry, to concepts related to animal milk, motherhood, the body, fairy tales, war, politics and death.

The film, divided into several parts, is the result of an extensive project conceived by Baruchello between 1978 and 1979. The theme of sweet taste became the starting point for a reflection on memories, stories and political and cultural issues of the time, such as imaginaries, stereotypes and systems of power. Eventually, it leads to considerations of animal death and the decomposition of flesh as consequences of violence, cultural power and the exploitation of nature.

To mark the opening of the exhibition, on Friday, Oct. 26, at 6 p.m., the Cinéma du musée at the Centre Pompidou will screen Verification Uncertain, a 1964 experimental film by Baruchello and Grifi. The work, resulting from the destruction and reassembly of about 150,000 meters of film belonging to 47 films from the 1950s and 1960s, mostly American and destined for pulping, is already part of the Centre Pompidou Collection.

The first screening took place in Paris in the spring of 1965, at the Centre de Postproduction Poste Parisien on the Champs-Élysées. The audience, which included Marcel Duchamp (to whom the film was dedicated), included Max Ernst, Alain Jouffroy and Man Ray. In 1966, John Cage presented the film at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, on the occasion of Baruchello’s solo exhibition at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery.

The new installation of Doux comme saveur at the Centre Pompidou was made possible thanks to the contribution of Philippe-Alain Michaud, Jonathan Pouthier, in collaboration with Enrico Camporesi, Carla Subrizi and the Baruchello Foundation.

It was Baruchello himself, in 1979, who described his operation on the sweet taste this way “The choice of this film was influenced by the personal observation of the absence of sweetness/sweetness from one’s own life and the world around him. Talking about it may have been, at least in the beginning, an activity not far from exorcism. Out of that initial unclear mood, that hunger, that absence, and after many years of attention to food and its sacred relationship to the spirit, the idea that sweet is the primordial shorthand sign of every flavor resulting from the act of eating was thus born: mother’s milk, sugary juice of the fruit, honey of the bees, manna sent to God’s people in the desert, etc. An itinerary that complicates, deviates, enriches itself by branching out through 150 pages of a book-like object made up of notes, prospectuses, drawings photos and photocopies, clippings not different in appearance from other previous para-literary, extra media operations I have done (for example, the book L’autre house published by Galilée with a preface by Jean-François Lyotard this same year). The book, but it is only summarily bound sheets of paper, lends itself to being placed in the hands of third parties whom I can ask what they think both of the book and, more generally, of the topic it seems to deal with. The third parties who are then a very dissimilar set of philosophers, writers, poets, painters, workers, priests, children and perhaps even, by managing to find some willing to talk to us, politicians, military men, policemen, prison or asylum directors.”

About montage, a conceptual operation at the basis of all his work, Baruchello, in 1978, wrote, “Montage is in fact for my work, 60 percent of the filmic operation, and the many short films I have made, had a precise sense parallel to my work as a painter. The latter consists of a ’multi-layered’ operation that requires (not unlike the mechanism of thought) continuous mutations, short-circuits, overlaps, etc.”

Pictured: a frame from Doux comme saveur.

Doux comme saveur: at the Centre Pompidou the multimedia work of Gianfranco Baruchello

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