Harald Fernagu is a Viking. His name seems to show as much. What is more, he is, I think, quite proud of his name, rugged as it is, and brimming with age-old fables. He is also fond of pointing out that his first name means “He who goes to fight”. And war, that war we know nothing about, has only ever been rarely referred t,o by him and by me. Now, it is always interesting to have the viewpoint of a Viking about these particular aspects of human activity. Because, in effect, the objects of the conflict, uniforms versus weapons, and the staging of the battle are at least pervasive, and at the very least recurrent in his work.

But there was a debate prior to our warlike discussions. And it had to do with the more or less bellicose nature of the Viking civilization. The reports that have remained with us of those waves of Viking invasions are essentially annals and chronicles drawn up by clergymen. Such ecclesiastics have painted apocalyptic portraits of those pseudo-invaders, because they were pagan, and because they unscrupulously attacked the properties of the church. The raid against Lindisfarne Abbey (in what used to be Northumberland), on 8th June 793, is generally regarded as the very brink of Viking myth. But a contrary hypothesis is tending to gain currency among certain specialists, including Régis Boyer, who boldly writes thus, against the grain of accepted thinking: “Let’s say it and repeat it, the ideology of the warrior feat does not seem to me to be the number one Viking preoccupation¹.”

So, he explains, among other examples there has been a desire to make Odin, a figure at the core of Scandinavian paganism, a warrior god, something he only was in part, being more of a master of guile and cunning, but also a thief of poetry. “The Great White Barbarians”, dear to Chateaubriand, certainly turned Europe upside down between the 9th and 11th centuries, but possibly not in the abrupt and violent way that is commonly thought.

The debate can be set forth in the following terms: was this civilization fuelled by a strictly warrior ideology? did it take war per se from Iceland to the Black Sea? or alternatively was it an essentially trading culture which was prompted to take up arms and use them because of its love of pillage and opportuneness.

This ambiguity is absorbing and can be traced, in a way, in Harald Fernagu’s career. Otherwise put, when, to all appearances, and in view of some of his works, war seems to come across as a primary and cardinal preoccupation, it only ever is in a secondary, echo-like way. And as with his alleged ancestors, behind the warlike gesture, on the sidelines of the heroic gesture, there is a more fundamental obsession, which is the aesthetics of trade, the logic of the market, of potlatch, barter and exchange, and the haunting issue of the arbitrary value of objects. We know that the Vikings allotted a higher value to raw materials than to worked objects. They accordingly broke and crushed ciboria, crosses, crowns and other forms of jewellery, keeping and transporting just shapeless heaps, “compressions” of gold, silver and bronze. It is because space was at a premium in their vessels that a concentrated mass would up the volume of their booty. So scrap merchants rather than aesthetes, wholesale traders rather than collectors of knick-knacks. In a way we find this conception of merchandise and its relative value in the penetrable installation Faust Connection (2008). Kinds of stalactites are formed by a sequence of varied objects: plastic and stainless steel crockery and cutlery, sporting trophies. Everything is oddments, piled up without any value-related hierarchy, set up on a rod which only seems to answer a purely functional question of logistics and ergonomics.

The issue of exchange value—how the arbitrary logic of markets endlessly reinvents the quoted prices of goods and beings—seems central to this approach. It is not for nothing that Harald Fernagu works with the Emmaus community in Dijon². For years he has been rubbing shoulders there with women and men excluded by society. Accidents, dramas, mistakes and misunderstandings, all have meant that their itineraries have rebounded, and certainly not enjoyed any upward direction; rather, they have been combined with the themes of collapse and dereliction. Their social value has been gnawed away at, and more or less abruptly done away with, ending up with them being likened to those “over-struck” pieces of antiquity which, by dint of wear and tear, have shed all economic legitimacy. Harald Fernagu “uses” them as models, he gets them to pose as soldiers, and unlikely war heroes, like Godard’s Carabiniers. In order to dress them up, he retrieves and recycles unmatched parts of uniforms, decorations of no value now, cobbled together props, all so many objects also found in the piles of secondhand clothes at Emmaus. All this overlaps, sadly and miraculously, so well do the bodies and their traits attest to this scandalous frivolity on the part of capitalism, tyrannical and cantankerous judge of the ends of life for people and goods alike. And if the Compagnons d’Emmaus—the Friends of Emmaus—pose as operetta soldiers, it is not so much to present makeshift war as the subject: it is to do something makeshift, period. Because war is in the makeshift process rather than vice versa. Harald himself let me in on a very lovely hunch of his by pointing out a certain etymological track to me. French “bricole, brigole: Ancient weapon; catapult that was made of leather, and used to hurl lead balls and stones; bricola.³”

Generally speaking, the catapult was a (stone-)throwing device which was built, during a siege, on the spot, with any materials that were at hand nearby. The “bricole” came into being as a result of “bricolage” (the makeshift use of available materials) and, once manufactured, the “bricole”—meaning catapult-- made war possible. It is this kind of makeshiftness (“bricolage”) that is shown in these photos, rather than war per se. A makeshiftness involving cobbling and patching things together, repairing and mending, all these operations being a combat per se. Because in the end of the day, by virtue of repair work, it is a matter of making an offensive comeback for these apparently defeated soldiers. They make a comeback in art, by way of the photo, and in the glorious glow of pseudo history painters. Through this shift to art, individuals and objects are suddenly put back into circulation, on stage, in the saddle, just like Hubert in Sauvez la France/Save France.

The same goes for Les Cuirassés/Battleships (2008). “This is a sculpture of warlike forms, whose assembly technique is a makeshift operation—a “bricolage”—borrowed from popular hobbies (model-making). What is nevertheless at issue here is more the assimilation of an accumulation of battleship-shaped objects than copying the same. What thus emerges from these rusty, deteriorating objects (assembled in this way) is a markedly gendered state.” Here again, war is not the challenge of some depiction. What comes across, though, is this other war, waged by all the wherewithal of makeshiftness, in order to reinvent a value for materials and things discarded, that are generally condemned to a position of commercial powerlessness. In Harald Fernagu’s work, war is invariably a social or economic war, never warmongering activity per se, this latter being confined to evocations coming from the world of childhood. The same way, moreover, that everything in Harald Fernagu’s oeuvre, illustrated by war, deals with visions of childhood. An ideal illustration whereof is this installation made up of 200 miniature tanks cobbled together using mechanical scrap, a warlike fresco with the beautiful if unexpected title Les Jouets qui trainent/Scattered Toys (1999, Frac Bourgogne).

“So the complete set of the handyman’s wherewithal cannot be defined by a project (which, incidentally, would presuppose, as with the engineer, the existence of as many instrumental sets as types of projects, in theory at least); it is defined solely by its instrumentality, otherwise put--and using the handyman’s actual jargon--because the bits and pieces are collected and kept on the basis of the “it can always come in handy” principle. Such bits and pieces are thus sufficiently half-specified for the handyman not to need the apparatus and know-how of all the various building trades, but not enough for each part to be forced into some precise and clearly defined use. Each element represents a set of at once concrete and virtual relations; they are operators, but may be used for any manner of operation within one and the same type.⁴”

The Tribulations of a Country Priest (2008) are a series of nine photographs, nine almost similar portraits of Raymond, another Friend of Emmaus, posing as a priest. As far as Reliquary (2008) is concerned, “this is a series of forms borrowed from religious objects, but made using techniques found in popular recreational hobbies, collages of shells, assemblages of items found in a shop (La foire fouille, a French chain of discount rummage stores), customized dolls… In these works, sculpture plays with the place of the photograph by giving it the exposure time of the things it is composed of. Or perhaps it is the photograph that gives part of its state to sculpture? By way of religious imagery, I wanted to feel a reality of the work: any work is a world that is at once something independent and an overlapping context where things are combined with each other, on an indefinite basis. Within this proposal there is a state within a state. The object is both sculpture and photograph. Raymond, here playing the priest, is at once image and individual. The work’s reality resides not only in its material nature, but also in a meaningful immaterial space which overlaps with many different realities: the exhibition venue (its broadened boundaries), the onlooker’s space (its subjectivity), the fictional space (which it submits to interpretation), the space of historical and plastic references, our shared culture… From these overlapping contexts there comes into being an experience, a fulfillment: something transcendent.”

And if this transcendence is advanced in this way, putting the stress on its naïve character, and on its egregiously makeshift nature, this is because we find therein, and underlying it, this same emphatic issue of the combat between objects and ideas, to be used, used again, and forever re-used. War, here, is not so much the means of conquest and abduction, but the technique of adaptation and acclimatization. And here we are back once more with those famous Vikings, whose pagan irreverence was so scary for Christendom in the Middle Ages. Because we are quick to realize that those fearsome assailants turned out to be amazingly flexible when it came to adapting to new religions. Effortlessly, they would become very perfect Christians, when this proved to be a necessary step for their establishment. In those moments of their history, they thus embraced a religion which, for want of culture and for want of that particular culture in any event, assumed airs of great simplicity, summed up in a few shaky symbols, devoid of the scholarly depths of Biblical Texts. They cobbled together a Christian religion where objects were everything and the liturgy was a comedy all made up of mending and trompe-l’oeil. A religion of childhood.

This novel site of images and objects dealing with the infancy of religion emphasized the scope of the work as a whole, when there were signs of the basic outline of an obsession--in this particular instance an obsession with relics. For no matter how ennobled and sanctified relics may be, they are still the object, or the outcome, or the synonym of remnants. Remnants are what remain after rejection, the form of the waste, the abandoned sideline, the more or less wholesale loss—in a nutshell: refuse, rubbish. Relics are the factor through which redemption is likely to pass, when remnants, removed from any dream of transcendence, can only be understood in terms of infamy and fiasco. The wars hatched by Harald Fernagu, arming his catapults (bricoles) with ammunition that is far more literary and lexical than may appear, all share in common the fact that they put relics and remnants on a collision course.