Imitation of Another’s Work Reveals Much About Mimic

When Gilles Barbier graduated from his Marseille art school in 1992, he felt burned out and lost. To kill time, he began systematically copying pages from his “Petit Larousse,” the standard desk reference familiar to French students from childhood. Barbier’s edition was, in fact, printed in the year he was born, 1965. His oversize versions of its pages started as an act of quiet desperation that, in effect, became his career.

Now on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, “Copywork: The Dictionary Pages and Other Diversions” consists of a dozen 7-by-7-foot handmade enlargements of text and illustrations derived from the Larousse. The other diversions of the title consist of miniaturized versions presented in two model museums that Barbier made for his art. One, a scale model, depicts a more or less standard art barn; the other is a rendering of a spaceship evidently intended to imaginatively preserve Barbier’s work in a kind of mobile time capsule.

The artist does encapsulate the developed world’s millennial cultural landscape. With almost unsettling aptness, he identifies its contents with an encyclopedia. Factual, descriptive and categorized, such tomes are storehouses of fixed knowledge. For someone of Barbier’s generation, then, the Larousse encyclopedia has to stand for that late modern period when most art was achieved through historical recycling rather than originality. In that sense, the artist’s decision to copy was simply bowing to the inevitable.

Historically, Barbier seems to have made copies simply because everything else already had been done.

Barbier’s pages evoke two pillars of modernism whose fame rests on their lack of inventiveness. Marcel Duchamp made his art largely by designating existing objects as artworks. Andy Warhol went a step further by making silk-screen blowups of images from the media. In this company, poor Barbier’s only distinction is his arduous hand-rendering. Even there he finds a predecessor who beat him to the punch. In the ‘70s, Allen Ruppersberg hand-copied Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” onto large canvases.

If we’re inclined to appreciate Barbier’s translations of photos and engravings into drawings and his calligraphic rendering of mechanical printing, we’re reminded of Saul Steinberg’s wonderful “forged” documents.

Let’s say the other guys managed to bumble across their artistic identities by just flaunting their bravado. Barbier does the opposite. He assumes the posture of the cloistered monk, attempting to lose himself by humbly copying a great text.

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By concentrating on Larousse instead of himself, Barbier dramatizes a monumental paradox. In the act of attempting a faithful copy, a flesh-and-blood individual will inevitably deviate from the prototype. Only machines are capable of real replication. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he really created a robot that speaks with society’s voice of authority. Barbier’s copied pages inevitably become the idiosyncratic voice of the individual interpreting the text, even in spite of itself.

The charm of Barbier’s work is its capacity to expose the absolute nonsense embedded in rational process. One big sheet gets into the alphabetical combination of the letters B, O and X. We find ourselves looking at canine animals and Homo sapiens athletes, both called “Boxer.” Do they have anything else in common? Are both kept in boxes when not in use? You can’t tell, because the container we call a “box” in English isn’t on the page because in French it’s “boi^te.”

How then do we balance between the chaos of the irrational and the coercion of pure practicality? In his most elaborately realized page, “From ‘Cinematography’ to ‘Colophony + Errata,’ ” Barbier suggests the solution is within the realm of the playful.

SBMA curator Diana C. du Pont organized Barbier’s show as part of the series “Co^te Ouest: A Season of French Contemporary Arts.” It’s accompanied by a catalog, including a CD-ROM.

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* “Copywork: The Dictionary Pages and Other Diversions,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara, to Jan. 30. (805) 963-4364.