The question of artistic quality rarely comes up in connection with television, as if that were inappropriate, out of place. If is true that few directors have systematically explored the expressive possibilities of electronics. But French television has one remarkable exception: the work of Jean-Christophe Averty, in its radical originality, refutes all those who see creative work as something which is possible only in opposition to television, as "independent" video standing outside of the system. With his amazing curiosity and his notorious non-conformism, he is a magician of the special effect, a king of black humor, an electronic poet, a permanent scandal, an outsider from within who works with every genre (dramas, variété, jazz, etc.), always playing with the ethical and aesthetic limits of felevision even while revealing it for all to see.

The Art o f Television Averty is simultaneously dadaist, surrealist, intellectual, adherent of Oulipo, pataphysicist, postmodern - and not just since yesterday. In all his works he makes ample use of reproductions, quotes, appropriations, collages, tricks, and intertextuality. He was the only one to dare electronic adaptations of unknown texts by artists such as Rousseau or Picasso or from the works of Jarry ("Ubu Roi" in 1965 was a virtual manifesto of the electronic style of expression), from Raymond Roussel, Cocteau, or Lautréamont. He calls himself a "doer" or "creator" rather than an artist, and his unceasing inventions embody precisely that which is considered an inherent contradiction - the art of television. Averty takes television by its word. He confronts it with its own image - and not through simple parody or participation, but by consciously appropriating its models and thus revealing precisely how the medium works. Whether it be the recycling of images of all kinds, the creation of collages made by linking programs togefher, or whether it be this extraordinary mixture of inspirations, genres, and a wide variety of artistic forms that replay the eclecticism inherent in television, Averty exposes these operations, reworks them within the system that produces them on the most massive scale. Within the continuity which is the constant flux of television broadcasts, he reappropriates a vast range of fragments - but with a delivery and a rhythm that even beats television in terms of speed.
If we are clearly confronted here with a work of television, this is also because it exploits the typical qualities of electronic material: tricks, screen size, etc. Averty is a pioneer of television thanks to his extreme, searching consciousness of the specificities of a medium that he has never identified simply with cinema or theater, and which, in fact, he prefers to consider as closer to radio.

A Different Conception of Representation One is confronted with a series of paradoxes in view of this work which connects that which cannot be connected by constantly generating a "unity of contraries," one where the true is simultaneously the false. Averty uses a medium of reproduction to reproduce com-ple- tely constructed, artificial worlds. The principle of the collage, the basis of his style, consists of disassociating in order to recompose, of fragmenting in order to unify. The space of the screen is purified, emptied of all that is anecdotal, all unnecessary details, and then saturated from other sources through the accumulation of images and repeating motifs, the proliferation of a few signs.
The small screen of Averty is a piece of precision mechanics that produces a whole range of specific transformations and collisions that no longer have anything to do with the usual realism of television. The "standard image" is dispersed, permanently challenged. Its unity is ruptured and reconstructed in a synthesis of the shot. The consistency of the image also comes into play, constantly ebbing and waning, seized by emptiness or excess. Some-times assimilated by a simple figure, it may become nothing more than a motif, or transformed into ornament. Subjected to multiple manipulations, it also becomes an object, a card to be played. Averty's work with television is aimed at giving a new status to the image.
As a magician and the heir of Melies, Averty produces effects for the sake of poetry, for play, from humor, for the sake of fun, in part just as Duchamp conducted his exercises of a "physique amusante," and not to create belief in the existence of another reality. His tricks want to be recognized as such and present themselves as precisely what they are: machinations.

Layout und Synthesis of the Shot The images of Averty present themseivesas "images," framed and sub framed, as resolutely two-dimensional. The screen becomes a page where every effect of depth is neutralized, particularly through play with insertions, where elements are placed on a background without perspective, in superimposed layers that overlap without destroying each other. Neither volume nor simple surface, these images nonetheless have depth. Their dimension is that of electronic vibrations, that is to say, of time and speed. Averty takes the frame of the screen as a point of reference, and, working like a graphic artist, fills it with a variety of signs (letters, hearts, stars, dancers, photos, posters, etc.), thus composing impossible worlds in which weightless bodies reproduce themselves without defined dimensions, floating and sliding in all directions at different speeds, and defying the laws of Euclidean physics. The cutting plans drawn up for each broadcast on graph paper show just how minutely each effect is calculated, how precisely each shot is constructed. All elements that contribute to an image are drawn, photocopied, and glued on superimposed blueprints.

The synthetic shot is the key to this style. By saving time for fransitions, Averty practices an aesthetic of collision which accumulates a maximum of elementary information in the smallest possible segment of space-fime. He prefers a single sign to long explanations, a title or a gag to the discourse of an announcer. He creates relationships between scenes which normally would have nothing to do with each other, accelerates their rapproche-ments, and thus perfectly accomplishes the project of the Futurist Cinema: "Cinemato-graphic simultaneities and co-penetrati- ons of various places and times. We will offer two or three different visions next to each other in the same instant and image." 1 Since these simultaneous time- spaces remain autonomous, part of the image can move independently from the others. Thus, that which lies outside of the image can be found in the image, a figure can leave, "be outside,' by sliding into the center of the space underneath a medallion. Actors, objects, signs, or fragments of scenes can suddenly appear ouf of nothing. Within such frameworks, that which lies outside of the image is omnipresent, equally in front of and behind the image or within its depth.

Multiplicity and Heterogeneity Another startling aspect of this work is the proliferation of references withouf exclusion of any genres or techniques, the appropriation of images of all fy- pes - from fhe musical, from folk customs or the artistic avantgarde, from handicrafts and the little singer from Sainf- Germain-des-Pres (Juliette Greco). Here television is not a vehicle of other arts but the site of heavy traffic, an exchanger of signs, a laboratory of subtle hybrids. Averty's conception of multiplicity and heterogeneity goes beyond the simple mixing of genres in order to work more sophisticatedly and subtly on style itself. He "jazzes up images," invents "choreographisms," and plays with the limits of tragedy and comedy, of the horrible and the enchanting.
The Collage While the image is often cryptic, to be deciphered like a blazon or a rebus, it is nonetheless neither abstract nor realistic. The electronic image of Averty is mixed, composed of elements of a varying nature: texts and filmed bodies, graphic symbols and photos. Averty uses the collage to produce Hhe impression of heterogeneity," and in the process plays with the varied effects of osmosis, assimilation, or infection between the various registers. He aims his efforts at bringing about a congruence of the true and the false. Averty obviously takes pleasure in "cooking up" these minutely elaborated compositions together with a variety of procedures of acceleration and entanglement. Thus he takes the collage to its limits, in a "mixture" sustained by pure electronic joy, by a euphoria of the material.

In an all-out attack on cliches, taboos, and the spirit of seriousness, "The Green Raisins" (1963- 1964) scandalized the public both with its graphic inventiveness and its biting humor. But then, all of Averty's broadcasts are scandalous to the extent that they show brutally and insolently just how much pure imagination most television viewers are beingjobbed of.