J’ai vu le fond de l’absurde et je n’ai pas fait le poids

Words, on a table, scattered. Words that seek each other out, that sniff each other out, that find each other. Every day, like a trance, Audrey Guttman composes poem-collages at nightfall, to conjure up ghosts, to abolish the distance between what is said and what is not. She humourously seizes on ready-made words, which she extracts from headlines (War! Invasion! Treaty!) transforming their political charge, or seizes superlatives from outdated advertisements (lotions, girdles, household appliances) which she salvages for poetry’s sake. From Tristan Tzara to William Burroughs, from T.S. Eliot to Kathy Acker, cut-ups are a fixture of art history and literature. All writing is, in a way, a cut-up, because what is to write, if not to arrange words that belong to everyone? Burroughs believed that cut-ups could be a form of divination, proclaiming "When you cut into the present the future leaks out". Audrey Guttman might reply that cutting the past allows us to know ourselves, here and now. Where the Beats were looking for hallucinogenic distortions, Guttman flares the meaning of words transformed into almost-images; traces of ephemerality. The wars follow one another and the advertisements too; the words come back, always the same ones. The artist brandishes the pieces of paper like flashlights, exploring invisible regions; finding, buried under the journalistic language of a bygone time; the matter of her own interior text. She recomposes a world, where time and space become fungible in her reverie. Perhaps that is what writing is, what art is: a dialogue between the living and the dead, an anonymous letter who echoes in all her artistic production.