The Map and the Territory Read Online Free PDF Page B

probably hard-working. The application itself, entitled “Three Hundred Photos of Hardware,” displayed a surprising aesthetic maturity. Avoiding emphasis on the shininess of the metals and the menacing nature of the forms, Jed had used a neutral lighting, with few contrasts, and photographed articles of hardware against a background of mid-gray velvet. Nuts, bolts, and adjusting knobs appeared like so many jewels, gleaming discreetly.
    He had, however, great trouble (and this difficulty would stay with him all his life) in writing the introduction to his photos. After various attempts at justifying his subject he took refuge in the purely factual, restricting himself to emphasizing that the most rudimentary pieces of hardware, made of steel, already had a machine precision within one-tenth of a millimeter. Closer to precision engineering in the strictest sense, the pieces used in quality photographic cameras, or Formula 1 engines, were generally made of aluminum or a light alloy and machined to within a hundredth of a millimeter. Finally, high-precision engineering, for example in watchmaking or dental surgery, made use of titanium; the tolerance was then within microns. In short, as Jed concluded in an abrupt and approximate way, the history of mankind could in large part be linked to the history of the use of metals—the still recent age of polymers and plastics not having had the time, in his view, to produce any real mental transformation.
    Some art historians, more versed in the manipulation of language, noted later that this first real creation of Jed’s already presented itself, just as in a way did all his subsequent creations, despite their variety, as a
homage to human labor
.

    Thus, Jed launched himself into an artistic career whose sole project was to give an objective description of the world—a goal whose illusory nature he rarely sensed. Despite his classical background, he was in no way—contrary to what has often been written since—filled with a religious respect for the old masters; to Rembrandt and Velázquez he much preferred, from that time onwards, Mondrian and Klee.
    During the first months following his move to the thirteenth arrondissement he did almost nothing, except fulfilling the numerous orders he received for photographs of objects. And then one day, while unwrapping a Western Digital multimedia hard disk that had just been delivered by courier, and which he had to shoot from different angles by the following day, he understood that he had finished with the photography of objects—at least on the artistic level. As if the fact that he had come to photograph these objects in a purely professional and commercial aim invalidated any possibility of using them in a creative project.
    This realization, as brutal as it was unexpected, plunged him into a period of low-intensity depression, during which his main daily distraction became watching
Questions for a Champion
, a program hosted by Julien Lepers. By dint of his sheer determination and a terrifying capacity for work, this initially ungifted host—he was a bit stupid, with the face and the appetites of a ram, and had first imagined a career as a variety singer, for which he no doubt nursed a secret nostalgia—had gradually become a central figure in the French media landscape. People saw themselves in him: students in their first year at the École Polytechnique as well as retired primary-school teachers in the Pas-de-Calais, bikers from Limousin as well as restaurant owners in the Var. Neither impressive nor distant, he exuded an average, and even sympathetic, image of France in the 2010s. A fan of Jean-Pierre Foucault’s, of his humanity and sly straightforwardness, Jed nevertheless had to admit that increasingly he was seduced by Julien Lepers.
    At the beginning of October he received a phone call from his father, informing him that his grandmother had just died; Jean-Pierre’s voice was slow, a bit downcast, but scarcely more