Artist: Antoine Duchenet
Exhibition title: Early tapes
Venue: Nighttimestory, Los Angeles, US
Date: November 3 – 18, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Nighttimestory, Los Angeles
Dec. 28, 1974
The plants against the light
which shines in (it’s four o’clock) right on my chair: I’m in my chair:
are silhouettes, barely green, growing black as my eyes move right, right to where the sun is.
I am blinded by a fiery circle:
I can’t see what I write. A man
comes down iron stairs (I
don’t look up) and picks up brushes
which, against a sonata of Scriabin’s,
rattle like wind in a bamboo clump.
A wooden sound, and purposeful footsteps softened by a drop-cloth-covered floor.
To be encubed in flaming splendor,
one foot on a Chinese rug, while
the mad emotive music
tears at my heart. Rip it open:
I want to cleanse it in an icy wind.
And what kind of tripe is that?
Still, last night I did wish—
no, that’s my business and I
don’t wish it now. “Your poems,”
a clunkhead said, “have grown more open.” I don’t want to be open, merely to say, to see and say, things as they are. That at my elbow
there is a wicker table. Hortus
Second says a book. The fields
beyond the feeding sparrows are
brown, palely brown yet with an inward glow like that of someone of a frank good nature whom you trust. I want to hear the music hanging in the air and drink my
Coca-Cola. The sun is off me now, the sky begins to color up, the air
in here is filled with wildly flying notes. Yes, the sun moves off to the right and prepares to sink, setting,
beyond the dunes, an ocean on fire.
James Schuyler
(p.13 in The Morning of the Poem; p. 233 in Collected Poems)
Antoine Duchenet, installation view at NIGHTTIMESTORY, Bouquet series and Instax series
Antoine Duchenet, installation view, Instax series, 2020-21, Fujifilm Instax Mini, frames (10 x 13 inches)
Antoine Duchenet, Untitled (1) (Instax series), 2020-21, Fujifilm Instax Mini, frames (10 x 13 inches)
Antoine Duchenet, installation view at NIGHTTIMESTORY, Bouquet series and Instax series
Antoine Duchenet, installation view at NIGHTTIMESTORY, Bouquet series and Instax series
Antoine Duchenet, Bouquet series (detail), 2019-21, bunch of stainless steel curves, variable dimensions
Antoine Duchenet, Untitled (2) (Instax series), 2020-21, Fujifilm Instax Mini, frames (10 x 13 inches)
Antoine Duchenet, installation view, Instax series, 2020-21, Fujifilm Instax Mini, frames (10 x 13 inches)
Antoine Duchenet, Untitled (3) (Instax series), 2020-21, Fujifilm Instax Mini, frames (10 x 13 inches)
Antoine Duchenet, Untitled (4) (Instax series), 2020-21, Fujifilm Instax Mini, frames (10 x 13 inches)
Antoine Duchenet, Untitled (5) (Instax series), 2020-21, Fujifilm Instax Mini, frames (10 x 13 inches)
Antoine Duchenet, Bouquet series (detail), 2019-21, bunch of stainless steel curves, variable dimensions
Antoine Duchenet, installation view at NIGHTTIMESTORY, Bouquet series and Instax series
Antoine Duchenet, untitled (diptych, left part), 2021, screenprint on kraft paper
Antoine Duchenet, untitled (diptych, right part), 2021, screenprint on kraft paper
Antoine Duchenet, Bouquet series (detail), 2019-21, bunch of stainless steel curves, variable dimensions
