Raymond Hains: A Lived Rhetoric A text by Nicolas Bourriaud on Raymond Hains

In 1994, when the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain moved from Jouy-en-Josas to the building conceived by Jean Nouvel on 261 Boulevard Raspail, in Paris, Raymond Hains presented the exhibition Les 3 Cartier. Du Grand Louvre aux 3 Cartier there. The title refers to navigator from Saint-Malo, Jacques Cartier, who discovered Canada in 1534; to the story of Cartier brothers and especially to Jacques Cartier, in whose London office General de Gaulle wrote his appeal of June 18, 1940; and finally, to the former Parisian department store Aux Trois-Quartiers. It is also a nod to photography, that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, and Hains himself—the exhibition presented his photographs of the Grand Louvre construction site taken in the early 1990s like advertising panels. In a text published in the exhibition catalog, historian and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud analyzed Hains’s rhetoric, a complex system of chaining in which semantics and psychoanalysis have a preponderant role, and understood the artist’s work as a true “theory of cultural chaos.”