Leonardo

Frank Leibovici is a French artist and theoretician whose work radically questions the use of the conjunctive word "and" in this field. His creative interventions cannot be separated from their theoretical program and vice versa. His often-collaborative work perfectly exemplifies the notion and multiple domains of practicebased research or theory-led creation. Besides, as an artist who is also a writer, critic, teacher, philosopher and activist, he also pushes the boundaries of what is generally considered to be "art." Although participating in the "uncreative writing" movement and strongly focusing on the deconstruction of life and art (for example, via his use of the various types of the documentary form), his work goes beyond most recent explorations of footage, remix or sampling aesthetics, since it combines and activates the anthropological stance of objective description and the highly politicized stance of subjective—yet more collective than purely individual—reaction against deeply rooted approaches to both life and art.

In spite of being a multimedia and cross-media artist, he is far from opposed to relying also on the allegedly old medium of works in print. Thus, he recently published two new books that offer different yet complementary takes on his work. Released by avant-garde publisher JBE Editions, De l'amour ("On Love," a not-so-ironic nod to the famous [End Page 359] early nineteenth-century treatise on the topic by Stendhal) gathers four real-life examples of modern discourses about love in an online, international context: an online chat room, talks on the Tinder app, the "phonetical" transcription of a sex scene and a multiple-participant love correspondence. The other work, Des opérations d'écriture qui ne disent pas leur nom ("Forms of Writing that Go Unnoticed"), has a more theoretical scope, for it tackles the impact of "hidden" writing mechanisms on "what" is actually being produced. Not regardless of its content, as would be, for instance, the publisher's choice of a typeface or the decision to offer the work not in print but as ePub only, but as a vital part of the production of meaning during the writing process itself. What makes Leibovici's argument so compelling is not only the shift in focus (what is generally seen as purely instrumental comes here to the fore, at the expense of what is normally seen as what writing is all about) but also the fact that the techniques and mechanisms he studies are not typical of certain types of experimental writing but actually define any form of writing whatsoever.

A brief overview of these operations immediately makes it clear that what Leibovici has in mind is less an emphasis on new or avant-garde forms of writing than a broadening of the concept of writing in order to reshape it in terms of writing in the expanded space: recopying, copy-pasting, compiling, sampling, subcontracting (for instance via socalled digital microlabor), indexing, liking, clicking through, retrieving, searching, translating, republishing, displacing, selecting and rearranging, tagging, aggregating, etc. (the list is all the more inexhaustive since technological innovations permanently open new possibilities). In all these clearly described and well-illustrated cases, Leibovici singles out the performative character of these operations, not simply as accompanying or supporting writing but that which proves to raise fundamental questions that go often overlooked or have consequences we still tend to link with the final writing output, rather than with the material and presently mechanized and robotized actions that actually perform them but never go without social, political, aesthetic and ideological effects.

The relationship between these various elements is then deepened in the last chapters of the book, where Leibovici close-reads some famous examples of these writing operations that go unnoticed. One of his examples is Kenneth Goldsmith's public reading (which is also a writing operation, one of the many that structure the author's creative reuse of a kind of readymade works) of Michael Brown's autopsy...