Une charogne

Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux :
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint ;

Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
Comme une fleur s'épanouir.
La puanteur était si forte, que sur l'herbe
Vous crûtes vous évanouir.

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons.

Tout cela descendait, montait comme une vague,
Ou s'élançait en pétillant ;
On eût dit que le corps, enflé d'un souffle vague,
Vivait en se multipliant.

Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique,
Comme l'eau courante et le vent,
Ou le grain qu'un vanneur d'un mouvement rythmique
Agite et tourne dans son van.

Les formes s'effaçaient et n'étaient plus qu'un rêve,
Une ébauche lente à venir,
Sur la toile oubliée, et que l'artiste achève
Seulement par le souvenir.

Derrière les rochers une chienne inquiète
Nous regardait d'un oeil fâché,
Epiant le moment de reprendre au squelette
Le morceau qu'elle avait lâché.

- Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,
A cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion !

Oui ! telle vous serez, ô la reine des grâces,
Après les derniers sacrements,
Quand vous irez, sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses,
Moisir parmi les ossements.

Alors, ô ma beauté ! dites à la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j'ai gardé la forme et l'essence divine
De mes amours décomposés !­

Charles Baudelaire, published in ‘Spleen et idéal’, chapter XXVII in Flower of Evil, 1857

A Carrion

Do you remember the thing we saw, my soul,
That summer morning, so beautiful, so soft:
At a turning in the path, a filthy carrion,
On a bed sown with stones,

Legs in the air, like a lascivious woman,
Burning and sweating poisons,
Opened carelessly, cynically,
Its great fetid belly.

The sun shone on this fester,
As though to cook it to a turn,
And to return a hundredfold to great Nature
What she had joined in one;

And the sky saw the superb carcass
Open like a flower.
The stench was so strong, that you might think
To swoon away upon the grass.

The flies swarmed on that rotten belly,
Whence came out black battalions
Of spawn, flowing like a thick liquid
Along its living tatters.

All this rose and fell like a wave,
Or rustled in jerks;
One would have said that the body, fun of a loose breath,
Lived in this its procreation.

And this world gave out a strange music,
Like flowing water and wind,
Or a winnower's grain that he shakes and turns
With rhythmical grace in his basket.

The forms fade and are no more than a dream,
A sketch slow to come
On the forgotten canvas, and that the artist completes
Only by memory.

Behind the boulders an anxious bitch
Watched us with angry eyes,
Spying the moment to regain in the skeleton
The morsel she had dropped.

— And yet you will be like this excrement,
This horrible stench,
O star of my eyes, sun of my being,
You, my angel, my passion.

Yes, such you will be, oh queen of gracefulness,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath the grasses and fat flowers,
Moldering amongst the bones.

Then, oh my beauty, say to the vermin
Which will eat you with kisses,
That I have kept the shape and the divine substance
Of my decomposed loves!

Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)

When thinking, approaching or making an art work although the process being a lively action that requires physical movement, the end result is usually always fixed and frozen. Like frozen in time and reality once it is finished. But mould or “rubbish” art has a life of its own. Dieter Roth’s mould painting are a mix of paint but also food and organic component that he let’s rot. Like Blazy’s orange, the artwork changes daily, taking different shapes, colours, texture and even odour, deterioration everyday an so giving us new image to look at everyday.

Mould also encourages us to see “beauty” differently. Because mould is seen as this alive invader, we are disgusted, but I think mould is beautiful. Anselm Kiefer said that he was once sat by a beach in India, and that we say different type of excrement on the sand, they all varies in shapes, sizes, colours and texture, and he found that surprising palette as beautiful as anything else.

Beauty definitely have to do with context and the connotation we associate with the “object” of beauty.

And so, mould can be used and seen as any other material to make art.