The video is structured as a recorded lecture. The filming, fairly rudimentary, was done in a single take. At the time, the artist’s cameraman and gallerist held up handwritten time cues on scraps of paper to indicate how much tape remained. The “professor,” Éric Duyckaerts, performs in front of various abstract diagrams, highlighting and circling elements as if teaching a class.

La barre de Scheffer [The Sheffer stroke] is a vertical symbol used as a “logical connector.” When placed between two true-or-false terms, it establishes a relationship that produces a true proposition—except in one case: when both terms are true. This can be summarized as “never both at once.” The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is said to have used the Scheffer stroke in his terminology to represent psychic constructs. It is a genuine cultural artifact, bridging mathematics and linguistics. In the video, the lecturer explains its history while drawing on concepts from art history and formal analysis, examining the different signs used to represent it. The audience, accustomed to viewing art, not following logic lectures, is left somewhat adrift. Their confusion is part of the experience: a disorienting, yet ultimately stimulating (and often hilarious) shift in expectations.

In a follow-up video from 1997 titled Pour en finir avec Scheffer [To Put an End to Scheffer] Duyckaerts wrote, “This short video lives up to its title: I wanted to put an end to these logical-mathematical ramblings, and the overall tone is brisk and matter-of-fact” [1]. He concluded, “I’m not sure anyone can understand much of it, but they will have also understood that this wasn’t the goal of this series of staged lectures” [2].

Marie Muracciole, November 2020

Translated by Laurie Hurwitz

[1] Artist’s remarks, in Éric Duyckaerts, exh. cat. (Dijon; Sète: Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Bourgogne; Centre régional d’art contemporain, 2002), p. 41.

[2] Ibid.