ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Sartre, not the philosopher Sartre, but the Sartre who writes essays on artists or who writes existential biographies. Initially, with regard to the French painter Lapoujade, it is shown that it is the act of socio-political commitment that interests Sartre, and when it comes to The Idiot Family, Sartre uses his progressive-regressive method, which is that of a back-and-forth between a socio-historical context and Flaubert's capacity to create a “project” for himself. The result is a bracketing of historical continuity and a valorisation of a “totality” that overwhelms the details of individual singularity. In a second step, the chapter takes up these two themes and presents three artists whose work has examined expressions of singularity or continuity. Allan Kaprow creates “happenings” in which he re-does everyday gestures, his own, in their details, as he has become aware of them. On Kawara's work is above all marked by the representation of a strict continuity, of millennia, days, and moments. Lee Lozano creates a method of self-observation of private and public activities, which she sets out to do. Rather than the back-and-forth of Sartrean analysis, the artists choose a radical face-to-face encounter with both singularity and continuity.
