Monthly Archive for November, 2009

Foreign Office

Publié le 30/11/2009 dans Textes

David Beytelmann

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See also the performance page: Foreign Office

May Thierry forgive me, for not having managed to write a fully theoretical piece that does justice to his hopes for Outside Lectures. I’ve given into the charms of semi-autobiographical fiction and am wading in narrativity; this is no way to practice philosophy.

When Thierry Fournier first asked me to conduct the interviews that the scenes from Outside Lectures are taken from, I must admit that I hardly saw myself in the role of the witness, and much less in the role of someone having a human experience to meaningfully recount, of which the general or universal import, in being inextricably individual, would be the very dignity—the substance calling on speech.

The idea was to speak simply and express how I perceived certain situations, to describe my perception of a problem, because I had already described them and because he felt my opinions were interesting for this particular work. One of the most striking experiences of my life—and I’d told Thierry about it—was working for a cleaning company (I would recommend this experience to all apprentice philosophers in between two takes of Das Kapital tome I). There I learnt, both socially and bodily, what it means to be what I call “an invisible person” (the guy who comes to vacuum and clean the toilets, and who is often a woman). It’s banal and everyday, but nobody seeas you, everybody averts their eyes, nobody dares speak to you, all conversations, all social situations, everything is beyond you. One becomes a mere spectatorly conduit of social interaction, not “somebody.” All the more so for those working nights in the subway network. I’ve made it a matter of pride to say “Good evening, sir.” Social life evolves according to this invisible limit deciding if you exist or if you don’t; you’re there but you’re just utterly irrelevant. No one has anything to say to you, there’s just the need to communicate what you have to do. Instrumentum vocalis.

My job was to clean three floors of an office block as quickly as I could, in other words before 7.30am (I arrived at 5am by bicycle, as this was when the guards changed shift) “to avoid seeing the employees when they would begin to arrive,” said my supervisor. What was interesting, in this experience, was the aftertaste of serfdom it left; it’s a totally and utterly disembodied socio-economic relationship, and it’s accepted as such. Nobody feels the need to address you with the norms and modes of typical face-to-face interaction. Nobody will say to you: “Hello, excuse me, where has the coffee been put?” Instead they’ll say “where’s the coffee at?” This brief description is of course clumsy, given our more or less general awareness of the mild manneredness that maintains the pecking order. Here, however, I simply point to how naturally we inhabit this mode. One of the projects vindicating me and that I shall perhaps never accomplish is to account for the experience of cleaning workers, a manner of speaking the conflict created by being necessary to the reproduction of material life and yet allthewhile treated like dirt, like nothing. This is also and far too often an experience that only affects “immigrant workers.” I’m not quite sure how, but I would like to explore this experience, almost like an homage to to those anonymous souls having to turn the crank on part of the capitalist merry-go-round. An image from Patrice Chéreau’s 1981 production of Don Giovanni at the Théâtre du Châtelet comes to mind: while the action is taking place on stage, large teams of workers labor away, barely taking in what’s happening before them, as if absorbed in an all-consuming and never-ending task. During this time, those in power bustle about and have the time to wonder wistfully about whether they’ll get an erection or not. It seems to me that there’s a kind of ironic note to the fact that the cleaning sector operates under this same dynamic, and that the current French president won an election by campaigning on a theme dear to the extreme right: “national identity.”

But to return to these experiences… sure, well, yes, but I got out of it. It was a passing moment. Not my social destiny, I’m petit bourgeois. I’ve gone to university. There are many people, every day, who continue to survive in these conditions, they have neither face nor voice, their experience remains silent and mine has been a passing moment, I cannot manage to be their voice. These are some of the things that came to mind when Thierry asked me to speak in front of the camera.

But despite this, I could see myself speaking about what Thierry thought to ask me to recount. I think that this is because I trust him, out of affection and politics of a sort, and out of the understanding and affinities we share. He had previously let me know and so I already had an idea of what he was interested in, of what he’d been thinking about. We’d already exchanged a fair bit about political, personal or family stories, about minor events whose meaning is unavoidably political yet, paradoxically, only declared in the dramas of privacy. I’ve got to admit, it all begins with short anecdotes, around a table, a café, in the middle of a conversation, like when you associate a sound or smell to something that stops you dead, listening to a great piece of music in your apartment, watching the streets of Paris unfurl indifferently out your window. Yet the material of life-been-lived, the thickness of words put to describing experiences, seemed also quite intimidating to me. I felt something akin to uneasiness, embarrassment—this may ring a little false like false modesty, but it’s true.

In fact, I’m tormented by those folk that have “really lived something.” It begins early on in life, like when you’re told as a kid that your great grandfather saw half of his family knifed to death by porgromists and then left to Paris on foot. In this sentence, the person telling you the story emphasizes the words “on foot.” The same guy (his name was Aaron) sets up in the Marais area of Paris, learns a trade and becomes a tailor and, after great effort, manages to send for his wife, in the Ukraine until then. She settles down with him, but soon falls ill, she has to be sent to hospital, until one fine day when Aaron receives a letter informing him he can go pick up his wife (I wasn’t told what her name was). So he buys the finest cloth and makes a beautiful dress for her. But when he goes to the hospital to pick her up, he is told—or rather he’s made aware—that she’s dead, that he has to retrieve her body. In the only photograph we have of him, Aaron is serious with a Sicilian-style mustache. He has strong a jaw line and a sad look in his eyes; they’re outlined with kohl.

The moral of this story is that when you’re an immigrant, it’s better to learn the local language. (I’d add that failing having been able to enroll in the public school system, Aaron should have had a dictionary of administrative French on hand). My grandfather told me all of this and I’d like to make the most of this space to add that the bastard didn’t want to pass on Yiddish to me, because he was ashamed, and because evidently the emotional thickness of language does indeed exist.

But beyond the weight of such stories, I think it’s because I read too many personal accounts, too many narratives, because I listened to too many incredible words. Shmerke Kaczerginski and his I was a partisan (his memoirs as a jewish partisan in the soviet forests), Marek Edelman, the autobiographical texts of Jean-Pierre Vernant, Geronimo’s Memoirs, Hersh Mendel, the incredible Biografia de un cimarrón, Frederick Douglas or Booker T Washington, Joseph Dietzgen, Che Guevera, etc… the heroes’ hall is endless but retains a strange permanence, like the bent out goal posts of a football field long abandoned yet always taken up anew and trodden on by generations of players. I believe this is a permanence known to those readers who were taken off as children into the worlds and stories of Jack London. The merits of this secret epic can also have indescribable features, revealed in those almost anonymous encounters that we sometimes have. To this day, I can still recall a café in Buenos Aires, Avenida de Mayo, where exiled republicans would meet to talk and play cards. I remember that at the far end of the room they’d hung a Spanish republican flag (red-yellow-purple for those don’t know it). They would fight as they recounted the Battle of the Ebro. I remember one old guy who, extremely moved, told me: “You know, I killed someone back there. I saw him and I pulled the trigger. I heard him scream and I saw him fall slowly. He was just another unlucky guy like me. I still dream of him at night, I see his hand twisting on impact, like this. I was 16 years old.”

That’s some of the impossible tone that I’ll never correspond to, and that will always escape me. But I realize afterwards, and it’s the strength of the work Thierry made of me in some ways, his maieutics, that I still had something to say that was worth being shared. There’s no mystery to it, and I don’t think Thierry will hold it against me if I reveal the hidden secret of our interviews, but we laughed a lot about often tragic things.

I might be wrong, but I think that it’s from this experience, that I told him of, that the idea came about to speak of the inside/outside border through pieces of wallpaper coming off an old wall. I’m personally amazed by what he managed to do, the way in which managed to incorporate these ideas around a maté (seen briefly on the table), and I am also surprised by the depth that the problem of language takes with this question of ones’ emotional relationship to space and time as revealed through the migrant experience. I feel that it’s by speaking with Thierry, by trying to formulate what could unite a shattered experience, that I came to express a feeling which has followed me since childhood and which I had never quite found the words for. It’s the idea that you never really fit into the drawer. There’s always a leg or an arm sticking out (cf. “national identity”). Whether chance events or existential perspective, part of you is always foreign, outside, and strenuously resisting “national identity” which, after all, is just verbal lunacy: in Argentina, Argentinian but jewish; jew amongst jews, but with a mixed family, with the Irish, the Basques and the Indians; among jews, an internationalist, a cosmopolitan, not a zionist (which is to say nationalist); at school in Argentina, son of an exiled commie, under a military dictatorship at once catholic fundamentalist, anticommunist, Maurras- or Franco-styled nationalist; in France, a run-of-the-mill Latino (with all that goes with it)…etc. The list could go on, with various situations; you can see how certain “identity frameworks” seem to switch on, beyond your control, and with independent impunity, affecting speech and bodily characteristics.

For a long time, I wondered why it was that I had never managed to find the way to express, beyond mere theory, how much these various elements I’ve just spoken about formed an unstable whole. What I mean by this is that the political program of the nationalist normalization of social life consists precisely in destroying the categories of expression of these particular situations in order to slot them into an framework of experience that is prefabricated by a political discourse in which identities must be stable. Just like with the issue of national identity.

The fragment of Outside Lectures that I appear in bears a title: “Foreign Office.” I think the title’s basis is well justified: we spoke and laughed for hours when I recounted by anecdotes about the administration, and particularly my residency visa.

David Beytelmann
Paris, February 2009

Franck Bauchard / Outside Lectures

Publié le 30/11/2009 dans Textes

To develop library awareness of the recent inquiries of the Centre National des Ecritures du Spectacle (National Center for Stage and Theater Writing), to give an idea of what a stage at the forefront of today’s arts and technologies would be to territories directly concerned by the transformation of writing and reading. Such were our objectives when programming Outside lectures in the Gard and Vaucluse departments.

With a practice at the intersection of the visual arts, sound production and theater, and in collaboration with different artists, Thierry Fournier explores the question of writing in an unusual way for theater: with Outside lectures he offers a writing of the arrangement via materials taken from our political, technological and media surroundings. A light and mobile form that was developed to go right up to its audience, flexible and adaptable to all sorts of spaces found in libraries, and likely to provoke discussions and debates.

With the use of composite and ordinary materials—from television to cellular telephony, ministerial circulars to mongeese—so often expunged from the theater stage and through the role and presence of Emmanuelle Lafon, Outside lectures hooks up various recording devices to fragments of reality within one common space. The performances’ unity is woven from a common thread of inquiry: the question of access, or more precisely a range of scenarios dealing with “crossing” that demarcate inside and outside.

The only way to account for our technology environment, which has substituted nature for all intents and purposes, is to select fragments, juxtapose them, and have them commentate one another. The materials exist as such, yet are caught up in a new composition that both includes and surpasses them; they resonate and create new constellations of meaning. Outside lectures functions as follows: it is a non-linear, caustic, and sometimes abrupt account of the world through either live or pre-recorded devices, each conceived of to undermine political, technological or media-related levels of reality all rendered inconspicuous through daily usage. A reality of exclusion, surveillance and enclosure hides beneath the promise of access for all.

This art of writing for the stage requires its own reading modalities. Otherwise put: this creative process produces a new relationship between work and spectator. It is difficult to apprehend according to habitual judgement criteria, which, incidentally, it generally ignores or puts into perspective. It is presented as a crossing, a sensitive, poetic and cognitive experience that requires the spectator to make their way by free association between the proposed materials. On this particular level, Outside lectures sometimes intrigued spectators, even upsetting them. Yet it also created some magical moments where you felt a sort of public consciousness was gradually forming, an almost tangible clustering of questions, curiosities and perceptions on site.

When I think of Outside lectures, I think of a vigil around a fireplace that would both warm us up and enlighten us: a small assembly of spectators giving themselves over to the collective understanding of a world that was only more opaque for trying to become visible, where each and everyone’s participation was tested in the search for shared meaning.

I wish here to thank all of this adventure’s protagonists: first of all, the librarians who played this game with such enthusiasm, the Gard and Vaucluse departments who made it possible, and of course Thierry Fournier and Emmanuelle Lafon who crossed both departments recreating a space in each library where Outside lectures could be heard.

Franck Bauchard
Assistant-Director of la Chartreuse
Director of Centre National des Ecritures du Spectacle
January 2009

Thierry Fournier: Regarding “Outside lectures”

Publié le 30/11/2009 dans Textes
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Outside lectures is a series of seven performances for general installation, each of them deals with the notion of “outside” from different angles. The concept is broad, and I have often listened to proposed alternatives for a more concrete qualification, yet I am attached to this vacancy, this openness. I am also attached to the fact that it is by experiencing them that these seven performances that with very different situations (be they political, intimate, collective, fictional or media-related) outline a landscape, an idea, a proposal.

The relationship between inside and outside, the notion of access (to wealth, to borders, to representation, to work, to speech) cuts across all contemporary situations; it concerns both the political and the intimate. Generalized economic liberalism no longer allows anyone to live outside of its logic. The only remaining possibility is measured involvement from States and individuals—resistance, according to some. This system is increasingly grounded in the notion of access which has gradually replaced the concept of property as a divisive issue. “The logic of access is now considered to be the door that opens onto progress and personal accomplishment. It represents to today’s generations what represented to those before them.” The  direct consequence of this “world without outside,” paradoxically, is that the very notion of an outside has become all encompassing and fractal, which is to say constant on all scales. It simultaneously refers to relationships between individuals and their surroundings, their history and society; to fictions, myths and fantasies disseminated by the collective imaginary; to state political matters: globalization, policy and debates around immigration, the hang-ups and consequences of colonialism, etc. I have chosen to address this question with a deliberately limited proposal that, forgoing the question’s scope, allows us to seize upon its tendency to multiply and cross through a variety of fields: political, fictional and intimate.

All of these performances develop a relationship with the outside, spreading it out by way of a specific apparatus and form of writing. If they were stories, they would call on different voices: some would try to come inside, others would defend or test borders, would describe it from without, and others still would defend a territory or would have recently disappeared… The whole thing is carried by the same performer, Emmanuelle Lafon, an actress who agreed to go along with a project exploring the limits of visual arts, performance and theater.

The apparatus is minimal and mobile: television, conference table, amplifier, laptop, polystyrene… Given the lightness of this system each of the performances can be independently worked on, developed and presented—I’ll come back to this in reference to repetition and representation.

One of the aims of Lectures was also to take over spaces whose quality and location also questioned the concept of “outside” : public places, schools, exteriors, residual theater spaces, apartments, … Each of these spaces is called upon in its ability to become a space of temporary representation. The performance’s form is thus defined at the last moment, according to the host space: quickly taking into account a given location’s characteristics, the system’s flexibility means it can be set up mere hours before the show takes place.

The performer negotiates the part of lecturer or mediator as well as actor, testing these changing roles: distance, immersion, interpretation, lecture, commentary. The spectators share the same space. The “outside” regularly intervenes: through television, sound, and the set-up itself.

Lectures is grounded in a curatorial principle. With the exception of one episode working with the flow of televized data in real-time, each episode calls on an artist or author who I have invited to participate in the writing process. The current list of sequences is a starting point, which is up for revision as these collaborations progress. No order is set, and all titles are provisional. In collaboration with the creative development team, the location (or locations) that host the performances could thus alter the project’s two operating levels: the choice and number of sequences that will be worked on and/or presented, and the performance site (or sites); a single space, or a journey, whether interior or exterior.

This project is part of a process of inquiry into the possible connections between art projects and live performance, particularly concerning the changes in the performer and public’s respective roles: spectator involvement, interactive systems, procedural writing. Lectures calls on codes from the visual arts and theater (narratives, systems, actors, performance time and place), et questions them in relation to the “outside”: varied source materials, heterogeneous empowerment, non-stage spaces, spectator involvement.

[1] Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access, The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience, Tarcher, 2001

Conférences du dehors : du point de vue de l’interprète

Publié le 30/11/2009 dans Textes

Par Emmanuelle Lafon

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Processus

Quand j’interprète Conférences du Dehors, tout a lieu à vue, au milieu et autour des spectateurs. Si la salle le permet, la lumière du jour décroissant nous accompagne. La relation au temps et à l’espace présents est centrale : à la part d’improvisation propre à toute interprétation, s’ajoutent l’aspect performatif de certaines pièces réalisées “en direct” et la volonté de jouer dans des espaces diversifiés.

Il y a sept pièces dans CdD. Elles se répondent, contrastent, se chassent, s’enchâssent, comme autant de dispositifs  dont la capacité à agir, à transformer, est inséparable de la manière dont ils sont eux-mêmes agis, ou provoqués. Je traverse ces pièces et me laisse traverser par elles, accordant sans cesse ma posture. Actrice, performer, médiatrice, interlocutrice, vecteur , musicienne, un corps, je suis le fil conducteur d’un parcours suggéré aux spectateurs. Il y a une télé, une table, une chaise, des coussins, un morceau de polystyrène, un téléphone et un ordinateur portables,  un lecteur DVD, un haut-parleur, un vidéo-projecteur. Ils dessinent des espaces de jeu, et proposent des places à chacun (les spectateurs, Thierry Fournier et moi ). Les costumes sont noirs, mais on peut reconnaître des treillis, rangers souples et une inscription, “sécurité” , dans le dos de T.Fournier qui intervient tout au long de la représentation). Ces éléments sont en eux-mêmes des dispositifs dont nous usons au quotidien, ils participent de notre rapport au monde, comme outils, voire modes de représentation. Enfin ils sont précisément les supports d’écriture choisis ou mis en scène de chaque artiste.

Il s’agit donc d’un tissage de fabrique hétéroclite, qui tire sa cohérence de la mise en relation de chaque maille les unes avec les autres, mise en relation recherchée depuis la conception du projet jusqu’à sa réalisation. De là une grande variété des processus inventés pour activer ces dispositifs, et la nécessité d’en éprouver très tôt les charnières possibles.

Une étape importante des répétitions a été les échanges avec chacun des auteurs; certaines pièces ont même trouvé leur aboutissement en leur présence ( le jour où Jean-François Robardet a trouvé l’étui de polystyrène dans la rue sur le chemin de notre “pause déjeuner”, les essais image/son/corps avec Juliette Fontaine… ). Elles ont eu lieu en appartement ( sur une durée de plusieurs mois, passer chez T.Fournier un peu avant 13h et/ou 20h, s’entrainer 30 mn sur pub/JT/météo/séries, “jouer “ du polystyrène dans la foulée, faire alors entrer en résonance La Bonne Distance … ) puis dans la salle de danse de La Chartreuse, où la mise en oeuvre scénographique et sonore nous a permis d’écrire une partition d’ensemble. Les contraintes spécifiques à certains dispositifs nous ont servi à plonger dans le vif de nos enjeux, notions de dehors, d’accès, relation à l’autre, usages du langage… Par exemple, les appels téléphoniques de Ready Mix étaient consacrés alternativement à la performance et aux répétitions. Et jusqu’aux représentations, nous jouons et sommes joués par cette configuration  “ à distance “ et “ en direct “, le déplacement de l’usage téléphonique fait voler en éclats l’évidence de son rôle de communication. Ou encore, CdD s’ouvre avec Circuit Fermé, qui lui-même est lancé par l’horaire du Journal télévisé, donc tout l’espace/temps de la représentation fait écho à un autre espace, pour le moins public, celui de la télévision…

Aperçu

Circuit Fermé

19h52: entrer dans la salle avec Thierry Fournier. Les spectateurs sont là, installés de l’autre côté de l’écran de  télé. La télé est allumée depuis leur entrée. S’asseoir bord chaise face à l’écran, coudes sur les genoux, poings joints, pieds au sol. Pose du casque audio, volume augmenté pour que je ne m’entende pas, branchement du jack, j’agis à cet instant . Dire tout ce que je vois et entends. C’est impossible. Le faire: foncer dans la machine et accepter de me laisser faire par elle. Trouver immédiatement le placement de la voix, relâcher les épaules, laisser le regard mobile, ne penser qu’à respirer, quelques gestes m’échappent. Environ15 mn plus tard, T.Fournier éteind. Souffler, boire, s’étirer, se rassembler.

Ministère de l’extérieur (première partie)

La télé est tournée face aux spectateurs, retournée à son usage. S’asseoir à côté. Ainsi je m’inscris dans la continuité de l’assemblée. En prendre mesure. Présenter simplement David Beytelmann, philosophe et historien. Actionner le lecteur DVD. Interviewé par T. Fournier en 2007, c’est à chacun qu’il s’adresse aujourd’hui, c’est la parole et le visage les plus humains des CdD, alors qu’on le regarde à la télé, et qu’il agit en différé. Loin de produire un discours assigné à son statut, l’intellectuel parle de lui, de son expérience d’homme, on suit les mouvements spontanés de sa pensée. J’ai l’impression de l’écouter chaque fois pour la première fois, impression accrue par une autre écoute, que je superpose : celle des spectateurs autour de moi qui, eux, le découvrent. C’est l’occasion pour moi d’affûter mon oreille, comme le diapason d’un accordeur.

La Bonne Distance

S’asseoir à une table, surlaquelle sont disposés  un verre d’eau, un crayon, un micro, quatre pages agraphées, un téléphone portable. La lumière se modifie avec l’extinction de la télé et l’aide d’un projecteur orienté vers la table; je me racle la gorge, et je suis le bruit des spectateurs qui à ces signaux modifient leurs positions et angles de vue. Comment oser dire ce texte? A chaque fois je me pose cette question, chaque fois je la traverse au moyen d’une autre question, inscrite dans le titre- même de Noëlle Renaude, celle de la distance. Nous avons décelé-là une clef  dont on s’est servi pour mettre en oeuvre chacune et l’ensemble des CdD : “à quelle distance” se positionner? Pour dire, regarder, écouter, parler, adresser, pour ajuster la posture du corps, qu’il suive ou qu’il déclenche, pour “ faire semblant” ou “pour de vrai”. Ajustement permanent de focales.

Interpréter ce texte comme si c’était une conférence, avec réalisme, pour rendre sensible la tension existant entre ce qui paraît le motiver, et ce dont il parle au fond. Se maintenir en cet équilibre comme un scientifique maintiendrait le fil de son raisonnement, et ce jusqu’au point final, le seul du texte. Plaisir du langage (tempi, accents, volumes, adresses, silences, attaques, emphases, ajustements aux réactions de l’auditoire …).

Ready Mix

Boire et téléphoner du portable sur la table, je dis: “Allo Esther, t’es où? ”. C’est Esther qui répond, “pour de vrai” : Esther Salmona, l’auteur et partenaire. Elle est toujours dehors, il est toujours à peu près 20h22, mais les espaces qu’elle parcourt, les gens croisés varient chaque soir, devant, derrière, en haut, à côté d’elle, en marche, à l’intérieur d’un commerce, d’une cour… Sa parole nous transmet cela. La communication téléphonique est amplifée, l’habituel échange à deux voix dévoyé. Je me fais le vecteur de sa parole, mais mon oreille collée au combiné n’est pas qu’un prétexte, elle cherche à exprimer le paradoxe de la situation, à savoir la fabrication d’un temps commun mais pas au même endroit. Le comble d’un spectacle. Je lui pose parfois une question au nom de nous tous ici, qui sommes dedans – un “ dedans “ commun (la salle de la représentation) et un “ dedans “ séparé (l’imaginaire de chacun). Pour cela être au plus près de ma propre visualisation, intérieure et subjective. Sa voix et nos écoutes provoquent de courts déplacements de ma part, par ricochets. Enfin: “Et toi, t’es où? ” dit-elle,  je dis : “ Moi  je suis là “, et elle raccroche.

Il est remarquable que la plupart des spectateurs veulent croire à de la fiction, du pré-enregistré, malgré toutes les stratégies qu’on a imaginées pour rendre la situation du “direct” la plus claire ( paramètres de la prise de parole d’ E.Salmona, geste de la numérotation, téléphone cablé dès le début, interventions de ma part dans son flux, arrêt de la performance décidé par elle…) .

“ On se fait avoir ” , “ on se fait avoir mais on y croit ”,  “ on y croit donc on se fait avoir “, “ en fait on veut se faire avoir “… sous une forme plus ou moins anecdotique, les dispositifs de la convention théâtrale eux-mêmes sont interrogés. A l’issue de chaque représentation, propos infinis sur l’aptitude du faux, en tout cas de la fiction, à dire mieux le vrai, et qui mettent en relation l’ensemble des CdD.

Ministère de l’extérieur (deuxième partie)

La télé est rallumée par T.Fournier, bruits de tous qui se tournent vers le son et la lumière de l’écran. Je passe la main, confiante, à celui qui agit filmé, me place en périphérie. Rester aux aguets. La caméra s’est rapprochée, D. Beytelmann apparaît tout de suite en gros plan, sa parole est de moins en moins descriptive, mais très concrète, nourrie d’anecdotes. Il s’en fait le sujet et l’objet à la fois, quelque chose de poreux s’installe. Générosité. Le dispositif aménage un espace de résonance entre cette parole et, en puissance, celle de chaque spectateur. Ensemble d’écoutes. C’est le moment où les réactions, rires, sourires, interjections, sont les plus sonores. Mon étonnement est renouvelé chaque fois: je sens que cet homme à la télé est la fenêtre la plus ouverte sur le rapport de chacun entre son monde intérieur et l’extérieur, entre soi et l’autre. Boire.

A Domicile

Quand la télé s’éteind , une musique de film d’action retentit, laquelle on ne sait pas, LA musique de  TOUS les films d’action.S’approcher de la source sonore, un haut-parleur surlequel un ordinateur fait office de prompteur, lire au micro chaque ligne qui défile – viser du visage la webcam et en ignorer le mobile. Ce rôle, le style du texte de loi, la position physique penchée, la musique, le suspens et le danger et l’angoisse qu’elle dégage, laisser tout me monter au nez… ma propre voix se fait monstreuse quand j’actionne la barre d’espace, coller le micro devant l’enceinte, larsen, voilà c’est là que ça se passe, prendre du champ, les spectateurs me font de la place, se ruer sur l’enceinte à nouveau, hurler les mots qui me restent en mémoire: “ le siège d’une association ”, larsen, “ un local résevé à la vente “ , tomber, ramper, larsen, hurler, “ yacht de plaisance ” , c’est la guerre, dégoupiller le micro-grenade, T.Fournier se jette à terre pour rattraper la bonnette, je me relève essouflée, everything is under control, retour au poste, allez un dernier coup pour la route, larsen, je reprends mon calme et la lecture, respiration abdominale en contre-point pour adoucir la voix, jusqu’au silence.

Frost

Enclencher le programme de synthèse granulaire, déposer un MP3 au pied de la sculpture, puis le micro: je m’asseois là, curieuse. A proximité du micro chaque grain de polystyrène mu, frotté, égrené, produit un son: écouter l’histoire qui en émerge, qui change avec l’acoustique de chaque salle, le nombre et la disposition des spectateurs… Je laisse  tomber une main sur le bloc lui-même, écoute, le parcours doucement de la paume, des doigts, actionne le MP3 et on écoute Jean-François Robardet raconter une histoire qu’on lui a racontée. J’approche le micro du bloc, c’est une sonde, et le tout, un orchestre; au gré de la matière, des volumes, et des sons, je promène et de tout mon corps suis le micro, il s’agite, s’immobilise, s’éloigne, plonge dans… quoi? Un iceberg? Un building? La banquise? Une cité en ruine? L’oeil du cyclone? Le vent ? Un simple étui pour écran plasma? On écoute la fin de l’histoire de J-F.Robardet. Tenter la catastrophe, le volume maximal. Vertige d’échelles entre l’oeil et l’oreille. S’apaiser, partir, laisser le micro sur la sculpture. La résonance meurt lentement.

La Sentinelle

Ecouter le silence, puis laisser naître un nouvel espace fait de la lumière diffuse d’une projection vidéo, de mangoustes filmées, de leur environnement sonore, des mouvements et bruits des spectateurs qui reviennent de la “catastrophe”. Je m’y inscris à l’aide de l’ouïe et d’un sens “aveugle”, purement physique de l’espace, je ne regarde pas le film de Juliette Fontaine ni personne en particulier. En fonction des sons, positions et dispositions des spectateurs, je cherche où me mettre, là cet angle, cette jambe allongée, ce vide entre deux corps, le chambranle d’une fenêtre, ces tibias repliés, le bas du mur, ce coussin, la rangée de ces cuisses, cette épaule… Le corps trouve, reste jusqu’à ce qu’il commence à déposer son poids, jusqu’au début de la tranquilité, puis va chercher ailleurs, le contact avec les corps des spectateurs est plus ou moins chaud, plus ou moins prêt, rétif, surpris, tendre, figé, changeant, je capte de très près ce qui émane de l’heure passée ensemble, comme des ondes concentriques sur l’eau… La vidéo cesse, je reste , je perçois les lueurs de la télé qui marche sans son, l’accélération des pas de T.Fournier vers la sortie est mon seul signal pour partir.

Tournée dans des bibliothèques du Gard et du Vaucluse

Suite aux répétitions dans la salle de danse de La Chartreuse, nous nous sommes vite confrontés à des espaces aussi variés que les multiples “ coins lecture “ de chaque bibliothèque, un préau, une salle polyvalente isolée au milieu des vignes, le sous-sol d’un bâtiment à l’architecture moderne, une salle de concert, de réunion, de projection, une mezzanine, une église … Entretemps nous avons aussi joué à La Chartreuse. A cela on peut ajouter, bien en amont, les répétitions initiées en appartement. Ces allers-retours entre espace institutionnel, espaces publics, espaces privés, espaces assignés à une fonction, font partie du processus de création de CdD. Ils ont mis à l’épreuve les questionnements posés par le projet.

D’où la légèreté nécessaire, en terme de mobilité , du dispositif  à monter : le tout est contenu dans une voiture ( 3 personnes, costumes et décor), et dans une journée (installations, répétitions et représentation). Néanmoins c’est un défi car de nombreux paramètres sont en jeu pour une adaptation très rapide. En début d’après-midi il faut choisir un espace, le désenclaver de sa fonction, s’y installer, penser le rapport aux spectateurs le plus juste sans être jamais sûrs d’une jauge précise, travailler au bon fonctionnement indispensable  de l’antenne télé, du réseau téléphonique. Il me reste entre une heure et quinze minutes pour m’ajuster à l’espace , à la lumière et à l’acoustique, ajustements qui, de fait, se poursuivent au fil de la représentation, en fonction du nombre des spectateurs, et d’un environnement qui est doublement agissant car nouveau. Ajustements dont j’ai fait le fondement de mon interprétation: je n’ai pas de marques dans l’espace, mais l’expérience en moi d’un équilibre d’ensemble, l’ouïe est mon principal guide, et la sensation, presque animale, de la place et de l’écoute des spectateurs.

Jouer “ à l’extérieur “ implique une relation spécifique aux spectateurs, pas seulement scéniquement. Il n’y a pas d’espace séparé, comme dans un théâtre, la porte d’entrée peut donner sur l’aire de jeu, les angles de visibilité peuvent être très différents, par l’appropriation d’un espace “ extérieur ” nous proposons à des usagers de se faire spectateurs. Nous invitons ces spectateurs à apporter la dernière pierre au dispositif de CdD. Ils s’y sont plus ou moins préparés, mais la représentation est toujours suivie d’un échange, sous une forme ou sous une autre, ne serait-ce que dans la mesure où notre temps ne s’arrête pas là, il y a encore le démontage. En fait, ces moments d’échanges sont un réel prolongement à la représentation. C’est le moment des questions, qui sont exactement nos moyens de construction, souvent ça a lieu autour d’un pot ou d’un repas. A la collectivité créée par une représentation s’articule instantanément celle de la vie quotidienne…ou comment créer un espace propice et renouvelé à la parole.

Regarding Closed Circuit

Publié le 30/11/2009 dans Textes

Thierry Fournier

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See also the page presenting the performance: Closed Circuit

Closed Circuit, the first of the seven performances that make up Outside Lectures, suggests a spatial configuration and a specific relationship with the audience right from the outset. Audience members are invited to sit down in a somewhat circular arrangement, adjusted each time to the location. As with all of Outside Lecture’s set-ups, Closed Circuit’s very medium—the television set—is in plain sight. Set to TF1, it is on when spectators enter the room, and positioned such that they can only see the image when they enter the space, its back facing them when seated. An empty chair stands in front of the TV set. The sound is turned up; it’s 7.45pm. The audience waits a good five minutes, facing a television set that pumps out the usual pre-prime-time shows at an almost unbearable volume: artless miniseries, advertisements, like in a bar when it’s football time or in a retirement home’s common quarters. At 7.50pm, the performer quickly enters the room and sits facing the TV, followed by its guard cum technician who plugs a pair of headphones into the TV set and puts them over the performer’s ears. From this moment on, the only thing the audience will hear or see is the performer and their voice, deprived of both the station’s sound and image.

The performance lasts roughly 12 minutes, enough time to cover ads, the weather, ads again, and then the intro sequence to the 8pm TV news bulletin and presentation of the first item. During this time and in a continuous manner, the performer must repeat everything they hear and describe absolutely everything they see. The task is, of course, physically impossible given the audio and visual information’s density, ubiquity and simultaneousness. A simple protocol has been established, which in short means giving priority to the visual: don’t miss a single spoken message, describe visuals as soon as the voice cuts off, even if its only momentary; break off speaking as soon as a new shot appears to describe it, even if the previous description has not finished. It’s worth remarking that in this context and with this protocol, even the performer cannot hear what she’s saying, having been reduced to a mere reflex mechanism linking cognition and description. Perception’s central apparatus kicks in after this, to establish a spontaneous hierarchy of the most striking visual and audio elements. Via their description, it produces a kind of “perceptual summary” of this extremely dense and chaotic moment in the televised day: a constant semantic grinding, yet one from which ever-comprehensible voices, subjects and images curiously emerge. What’s more, talking with headphones on, the performer tends to scream rather than speak and thus becomes a sort of living loud-speaker, availing the public of the continuous chaos of stimuli that she ingurgitates, becoming the human relay for content that is always imposed from without. After a twelve-minute sprint, at roughly 8.03pm, the guard cum technician who had remained at his post on the chair during the performance, gets up and quickly makes his way towards the performer, breaking the exercise off abruptly with the press of a button on the TV remote. The flow ceases, the headphones are put away; the performer rests for a moment before going onto the next performance.

A form of “writing” is thus constructed on the fly, in real time, from the television’s raw content, in the absurd haste of live broadcasting, ousted with extreme violence onto the TV viewer. In turn, the mental and physical tension needed for this exercise produces a relatively accurate portrayal of the television vacuuming the performer’s “available intellect” (cerveau disponible—see note). The exercise could also be described as the converse application of Jean-Luc Godard’s adage (“The only thing to be done with the TV news bulletin is to play it twice”). By reducing the performer to a sort of funnel, shouldering all voices and images alone, the set-up also suggests that this general flow could be the product of one voice or in the least of one thought; as if the television itself was an author and therefore that the question of who is speaking could—and should—be raised.

(1) Who could forget the following statement from a 2004 interview of Patrick Le Lay, then managing director of TF1: “There are many ways to talk about television. But from a business perspective let’s be realistic: at bottom, TF1’s business is to help Coca-Cola, for instance, sell its products. […] For an advertiser’s message to get through, TV viewers’ brains need to be available. The purpose of our shows is to make these brains available, in other words to entertain them, relax them to prepare them in between two messages. What we sell to Coca-Cola is available human brain time.” Translated from Les dirigeants face au changement, Éditions du Huitième jour, 2004.

Conférences du dehors – Représentations

Publié le 28/11/2009 dans Documentation

Photographies par Alexandre Nollet des représentations de Conférences du dehors en octobre 2008 dans le Gard et le Vaucluse, avec Emmanuelle Lafon. Ces 134 images sont classées par représentations, dans les 12 lieux où les performances ont été données : Ansouis, Bagnols sur Cèze, Camaret, Châteauneuf de Gadagne, Courthezon, Goult, La Gare Coustelet, Le Vigan, Massillargues-Atuech, Pernes les Fontaines et Sorgues.

Ces images montrent l’adaptation du dispositif de Conférences du dehors aux espaces extrêmement variés de ces lieux d’accueil, certains étant parfois inadaptés et/ou exigüs : pour chaque représentation, l’installation s’effectue en quelques heures, en inventant un rapport spécifique à l’architecture et à la configuration du lieu.

Pour consulter les pages et les photographies spécifiques de chaque performance, voir : Conférences du dehors, Circuit Fermé, Ministère de l’extérieur, La Bonne Distance, A Domicile, Ready Mix, Frost, Sentinelle.

Unfold

Publié le 26/11/2009 dans Créations and Recherche

Interactive cinema, 2008-09
In dialog with the film Last Room by Pierre Carniaux
Original title : Dépli

The installation Unfold is conceived in dialog with the movie Last Room shot in Japan by the director Pierre Carniaux, who broaches relations between the collective and the private, word and landscape. The movie and the installation form a diptych, based on the same rushes. Their relationship proposes an interrogation about the evolution of the cinema esthetics and writing, and the status and praxis of the film viewer.

The installation is arranged and enacted in a cinema: a multitouch interface, set in the middle of the auditorium, enables spectators, on an individual basis, to try out an on-going browsing within the space and the temporality of the film’s rushes. Cinematographic space-time is here treated as an on-going form of matter, through which the spectator browses through the middle, and seamlessly, via a multitouch interface which physically engages him.

This browse is experienced like the itinerary of a body and a way of seeing: movements in time, shifts from one rush to the next, slow motion, jumps, and freeze frames.

Related to: Siren, To Agrippine, Open Source – See also the credits page.

Jean Cristofol / Net theory

Publié le 26/11/2009 dans Textes

Written for Outside lectures (forthcoming)

When I think of Outside lectures, the first image that comes to mind is a net. It’s not quite the idea of the network though, at least not in a first instance, however important this idea is here.  Before becoming a network, nets are merely an aggregation of things: a housewife’s webbed grocery bag gathered in a ball, or the fisherman’s fishing nets clumped in a heap on the jetty. An aggregation of things, though always retaining a particularly malleable quality, a shapeless density allowing the housewife’s net to fit in her pocket, or the fisherman’s in the rigging of his boat.

The props needed for Outside lectures fit in the trunk of a car. The form is light, literally. Nomadic, if you will. In any case, it’s transportable and adaptable, it’s meant to be performed from place to place, set-up and bumped out. These different elements are then spread out (deployés) in a display (déploiement) that changes from site to site, depending on each location’s conditions and circumstances. The first act of Outside lectures consists in casting the net, distributing its various constituent elements throughout a given space. Something akin to a shape is thus drawn, loosely traced around a center point in a circular motion. Some of the crowd takes to this webbed circle, they’re captured by it, caught up in it.

This description, however, is not entirely accurate. A first reason for this is that the circular form is, by definition, closed. It draws a line that folds back on itself and splits the world in two: inside and outside. As it happens, what spreads out (se déploie) is a never-ending movement that does not fold back on itself, for it calls forth differing scales and carries over onto discontinuous planes. And, as it happens, though a loop is made, it’s hardly circular—even if you are left with the distinct impression of a stage or a playing field, even if something does indeed take place, spread out, and resonate. For, as the name of the Lectures suggests, the distribution of inside and outside plays out differently. The movement inherent in the theatre design gives way to another movement, or runs into a kind of displacement that penetrates this design, transforms it, articulates it in another dimensional register.

The net is thus an assemblage, a system (dispositif) articulating a variety of elements linked by this “crossing” (traversée). This system is made up of a sequence of situations that hang together, insofar as it is said that a work of art seeks an equilibrium where it “holds” according to the principles of composition, in the musical meaning of the word. There’s something in installation work that gathers up a variety of elements through the interplay of their connections, whether a movement, a journey, or, indeed, a crossing. It’s both stationary and in motion; stationary like a house of cards, in motion like a breath or a dance step. Add to this the fact that the appliances gathered here, and through which each moment occurs, are so utterly banal and common that they’re part of our everyday lives: a television, a table and a microwave, a laptop, a cellular phone, etc., all laid out around a chunk of polystyrene placed on a sheet of plexiglass. It’s a sort of modest sculpture, a ready-made taken out of its packaging, a blank and empty architecture that the sounds produced by a microphone’s audio feedback come to explore, transforming it into a block of ice, an iceberg, the detached and fragile fragment of an ice shelf. As things ice over in this moment of sonic decomposition, the movement stops and turns around, form fissures, and language breaks down in a static-ridden avalanche. In the progression of sequences that make up Outside lectures’, only this moment sees the sonic loop become the closed circle of the stage, reduced to the kernel of its presence, to the here and now of the scene—and, yet again, you get the sense that its on the inside that things are unravelling.

Outside lectures starts at a set time, with a sequence of words akin to an absurd challenge: plainly recounting what happens on a television screen between the end of the early evening shows, often game shows, and the beginning of the 8pm newscast—in other words, this rapid sequence of non-events blending soundbytes, advertising, weather forecasts, announcements, jingles and the opening spiel from the news anchor relating the day’s main stories. The actress, Emmanuelle Lafon, sits in front of a television screen with headphones on. Watching a screen that we cannot see, she gradually describes what goes on, what is said, what is shown, and all of this in a continuous stream while obviously unable to say everything given the onslaught of images that our minds conjure up, bubbling on the very surface, in an uneven race between voice and mere speech act when faced with the dull enormity, steadily flickering and churning away. The actress sits at the very heart of the TV apparatus, at the crucial moment when the premier private French television station sees its highest viewer ratings. This banal explosion of empty signifiers in an instant shaping and structuring the daily lives of millions of homes is precisely what is hidden from view and re-presented through the performance’s blueprint: a body, present and opaque in its encounter with the screen—the brain in its encounter with the televised stream. This particular moment, both fascinating in itself and in its spoken rendition—in which we have to recognize (though some spectators cannot) that what’s at stake in this very moment is what really occurs on screen, what we in fact do not watch because we are here, listening to the actress, watching her expend her energy as we would empty our minds—in this way, this particular moment is not reproduced, imitated, figured, represented, but, in a certain sense, “over-produced.”

The screen weaves a temporal field before it describes a surface. Indeed, it is constituted by way of a dynamic relationship grounded in the inter-actions of thought and image. What happens in Emmanuelle Lafon’s spoken performance, in the striated tension of her delivery, in her efforts to articulate words that are always already wrapped up in other words, is that a temporal vacuum is created—a difference in speed that endlessly attempts to conceal itself. In actual fact, there is no movement, no shifting synchronic mass, but rather a constant back and forth between lapse and recovery. With speech front and center, thought becomes unravelled. The gap widens between hearing and seeing, the movements of mouth and words, and holding them together requires effort, the object of the performance being this effort’s very limits, beyond the rest of the “show” that is Outside lectures—if, indeed, show is the right word for this kind of piece. To my mind, this ever widening gap—repeatedly covered over, always shifted, renewed, multiplied—is what founds a general dynamic, spanned by clearly identifiable extremes (technological, political, mental) that entangle themselves in a composite experience that questions the everyday realities of the network and the place that subjects such as ourselves occupy within it. Folded back on itself, reduced to the grainy decomposition of a feedback loop, this same dynamic drifts in realtime with the sound performance Frost.

“The brain is unity. The brain is the screen. (…) Thought is molecular. Molecular speeds make up the slow beings that we are. (…) Cinema, precisely because it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the image with self-motion, never stops tracing the circuits of the brain.” Deleuze wrote this in the 1980s, finding it to be the basis for a philosophical disposition. “One naturally goes from philosophy to cinema, but also from cinema to philosophy.” Around the same time, Fredric Jameson noted however the paucity of video theory, especially regarding its dominant commercial form, television: “the blockage of fresh thinking before this solid little window against which we strike our heads being not unrelated to precisely that whole or total flow we observe through it.” The flow in question is an uninterrupted discharge. In a surprising moment of cynical clairvoyance during his time behind the reins of the aforementioned television station, Patrice Lelay blatantly stated that it was his mission to create the conditions of sale for “available brain time.”

Jameson contrasts this televised continuity with the cinema, or the theater, in which movement is constrained within the limits of the spectacle or the film. Cinema is, indeed, a temporal art; it aptly develops what Deleuze patently recognizes as a flow, but a flow that ends with the ending of the film’s very form, and thus its narrative construction: “Turning the television set off has little in common either with the intermission of a play or an opera or with the grand finale of a feature film, when the lights slowly come back on and memory begins its mysterious work. Indeed, if anything like critical distance is still possible in film, it is surely bound up with memory itself.” Through the dual effect of this ending and editing, the temporality of cinema is not the same as the continuity of everyday life. It’s an independent temporality, just like cinematic space is an autonomous space, with its own laws and rules. It’s a time to which we travel, a moment up in the air, a moment apart. In truth, cinematic fiction is established through the specificity of this space-time, much more so than through a given narrative invention. Jameson deduces from this that much like we should concern ourselves with memory, and our ability to create and store memory, so too we should question the fictional abilities of video, or its particular means of producing fiction, insofar as video’s temporality can no longer be distinguished for the continuity of passing time.

Television’s flow, however, is the product of a concatenation of consecutive elements that vary in nature—entertainment, games, movies, current affairs, advertising, etc. Homogenenous, unilateral and levelling, it cannot be equated with the digital flow generated from the multipolar distribution of ever changing information that ebbs and flows with the distributed participation of its users. It’s worth asking if Jameson’s point of view isn’t beholden to the “outside” that he finds himself in, beset by the flow spewing forth his television screen. Today, in any case, this “outside” has become an imaginary standpoint, an unreal space, not so much because we now live in a world without walls, rather because we now inhabit and think in networks, the objective forms of our globalized world. The same thing has happened to what we used to call cities. Town and country differed like two opposite realities and this opposition was spatially construed in the objective gap between the dense urban habitat and its ring of fields and forests. Long ago, cities lost their form and were separated into zones of varying density, thereby ramified, making up megacities that have, in turn, taken over chunks of countryside. The straightforward opposition between inside and outside or of here and elsewhere has but a relative significance in a networked world. This is why we can say that a world of networks no longer has an outside. Further still, the material city is compounded in the texture of information networks. The flow’s dimension and form have changed. With the process of generalized digitalization, video’s place has not been taken by one single sphere of communication, but by the spread of interconnected networks, coupled to reality through specific exchanges, multiple mechanisms that activate behaviors, modes of kinship and communication, as well as various power relations and strategies.

Often, the image that we have of a network is overly simplified: a flatted, two-dimension representation that struggles to rid itself of a center around which it could still attempt to organize itself, something halfway between a maze and a spider-web. We forget the networks call on networks and thus proliferate within diversified dimensions where relationships with time and space play out differently—which also goes for what we typically call the here and now of the present. In this multidimensional universe, it is less a matter of centers—singular or plural—than of knots which, though they act as filters, feed on the energy provided by the network itself. The flow is no longer the product of a particular point of creation and dissemination, but rather what constantly circulates, what certain extremes congeal and mingle together, what they attempt to commercialize, and, possibly, what they control.

We also have difficulty recognizing the fictional and political issues raised by the systems that activate these network dimensions. Outside lectures pertains to this context. One could say that each of the show’s sequences unfolds by activating a pattern, a situation or a relationship that plays on one of these modes. I use the word “activate” because it is as much about inventing a system specific to creating a particular experience as it is using existing, everyday devices in the service of a performative situation. The show’s very script makes use of devices not in and of themselves, rather in terms of what relationships to speech and to others they conjure, or even the simple fact of their presence and the diversity of their modalities—hence the loss overcome in their just “being there” and recognized as such.

All you need to do is spin the television around and it becomes a monitor showing an honest, almost intimate interview that’s halfway between charade and critical account of a foreigner’s administrative adventures in France. The actress turns into a lecturer and presents us with a speech emphatically drawing an analysis of a homeless man’s speech act: “I have nothing to eat.” Or perhaps a telephone call is made to an accomplice, describing the space she’s sitting in, moving in, letting us simultaneously though remotely experience her presence elsewhere, in a similar vein to radio reportage. In each instance, it’s a matter of language and words, the way in which meaning is produced and exchanged. In each instance, it’s a matter of how what is said can establish a space: speaking space, listening space, communication space. And, in each instance, a relationship is made beyond the silence and the solitude, a reaching-out to the other, a possible experience of self, an encounter with what might make up a scene or begin a story.

The only thing is, each time the sequences also produce a shift, they create a gap between discourse and speech, status, weight, the reality that’s involved and the manner that it crosses the present’s net. Indeed these successive systems even shake the present. They reveal its complexity, how it is crossed by another moment, how it is porous and run through by an elsewhere that is barely identifiable and potentially temporary. If the “out of screen” is decisive to the narrative potential of both photography and cinema, it’s no doubt this particular movement, the interim crossing of the present moment, that augments the narrative potential of networked devices.

The last sequence, Sentinelle, shows us something so obvious you want to call it out, despite the slightly paradoxical, mysterious or opaque effect. It’s a video on a simple loop: a mongoose shakes, turns around, stands up completely straight, in an almost feeble standstill, falls back on its feet and jumps out of frame while another, the same one, comes into frame, shakes, stands up, over and over and over again. One leaves and becomes the other, and both of them are just one animal, turning, shaking, standing, watching, reaching for an elsewhere we cannot see. A simple loop, with a match cut that, like a scratched vinyl, points to the slightly pixellized presence of the image. A figure at once direct, immediate and perfectly abstract, like the circular nature of the loop that produces it, that establishes its freedom of movement, its perpetual starting over.

Lectures suggests a communications space where memories of a recording slot into the span of what’s told, read, played or fictionalized. Strands of thought unravel in a space that’s made up of condensed layers, gathered up on themselves, dragged onto the folded heap of a net of which we’re ever constant interested parties.

Jean Cristofol 2009

Interview: Paris-art, June 2008

Publié le 26/11/2009 dans Textes

Interview by Evelyne Bennati for Paris-Art.com, June 2008

EB : The Cube Festival, held at Issy-les-Moulineaux between the 3rd and the 8th of June, gave us the opportunity to see A+, a work which was produced by the festival.

TF : Indeed, the piece was created within the framework of The Cube Festival. In part, the idea for A+ stemmed from the context of this urban-driven festival. The question of where a work is displayed and experienced is very important to me; I feel there’s a lot of work to do on this front. Furthermore, Carine Le Malet (programming coordinator and festival coordinator for The Cube) and I had discussed urban displays as a possible exhibition form throughout the festival. Lastly, I have been working with temporality for a long time now, in terms of the interaction between spectators and their experience of a particular piece. These three things intermingled very early on, grounding this extremely radical project. I even went through an initial stage where there was no shift in temporality whatsoever.

Could you start by describing the piece?

A+ is an urban video display whose screens show the view behind the monitor—but with a 24 hour delay. The goal was to retain the display’s traditional status as an urban device typically used for advertising. However, while preserving the display’s appearance, its position on the street, and all the other usual variables, it becomes emptied of its representation, drained in a sense, and replaced by pure temporality.

We chose the piece’s location very quickly, within a pedestrian space at Issy-les-Moulineaux, which allowed spectators’ to get much closer to the work.allowed spectators’ greater accessibility to the work. When on site, I experienced a kind of constant interplay, a palpable tension—people were examining the image, trying to understand what it was about. This was what I was really interested in, as well as the question of temporality. The whole thing also references 1970s systems called “closed circuits”, except that here the circuit can never be closed because of the 24 hour delay that separates the recording and display phases. This inability to close the circuit produces the range of possible interactions between spectator and image.

The piece made me think of wormholes in space, those theoretical passageways in the fabric of space-time related to folds in the structure and properties of matter. Were you thinking about this?

I’ve been interested in these questions for some time now. Though I don’t explore this field literally in my work, everything to do with the theory of time, such as expanding matter, is not only of great interest to me, but highly pertinent to my work. I was trained in the sciences, I am an architect, I have a developed dialogue with mathematics. The definitions of time and of space are central to my work.

By retaining this urban signage while drawing our attention to what we don’t usually see, you also raise the question of our relationship to the image. It’s like a transfiguration of banality. Passers by ask themselves what there is to see, in this game and mise en abyme[1], because they’re being filmed while looking at the work.

A+ is a work in which space reveals time, and vice-versa. This utterly banal framework shows something akin to temporality. Indeed, time is the only thing that’s actually expressed—which is no easy task. Banality, of a fashion, must be produced, allowing for a fresh take on a banal image. Time reveals the image and the image reveals time in a reversible movement. It’s a sort of constant back and forth between the banality of this framework and this temporality, which calls for a different take on an image that’s usually produced for advertising. And yet advertising shows promises us what will be; it raises the question of access. In a way, this concept works the other way round here. A+ thus links up with another piece, Outside lectures, in both a subversive and very personal manner.

Advertising is static, it’s a permanent image, even if it does provoke desire. A+ is an opening, it creates a gap that makes us think in three dimensions.

In four dimensions: there’s depth and there’s time with this piece; it creates a sort of “temporal depth”, the coexistence of two different temporalities.

A+ draws people to a halt. In this way, you really notice how much we’re moulded by the urban environment: there’s a display over there, there must be something to see. But there’s a need for an explanation, we’re not expected to pick up on the difference in temporality.

Yes and no. In keeping with a committed personal practice, I did not want an explanation to figure on the display itself, yet this was not the festival’s curatorial policy. I’m extremely committed to the idea that works of art are not accompanied by an instructions manual. For its spectators, the very nature of the questions raised by a work can vary depending on which path is taken. I do not want the process to be explained before it can be experienced. The way a work is received and kinds of connections made can be infinitely more open. This may of course lead to complete misinterpretations, but it’s all part of the way the piece works. All things considered, there’s no sign at the Pompidou Center next to a Beuys piece telling me where to look. It’s quite a pertinent curatorial debate, especially in the case of interactive work where the artist may want to either conceal or reveal their constituent modus operandi. I saw two six or seven year old kids who were looking at the display for five minutes. Their entire discussion revolved around whether the image was real or not. I have noticed the same maturity in their way of seeing among many of their peers.

The plaque short circuits the experience.

When it explains something, a plaque sets off a response mechanism in the viewer. In effect, it short circuits their perceptual entanglement with a work of art, and the relationship that they may make with it. A+ does not rely on an instantaneous interaction, instead it produces levels of interaction, whether social, physical or other. We shouldn’t expect interactive works of art to generate systematic insight or simpler readings. Viewers aren’t expected to understand this kind of work more quickly than another. That having been said, I am expected to construct a situation that will construct the spectator’s perceptual entanglement straight away—without the need for an instructions manual.

Your work questions our relationship with immediate temporality, transformed today by the ubiquity of channel surfing. What frame do you think we’re willing to hang ourselves in?

This questions relate to the whole field (of art). How much time does someone spend looking at a painting in a museum? Between one person and another, there’s an infinite scope of possible answers. A+ is about time, and so it rekindles questions like this.

The system leads viewers to think about visual perspicacity. It’s Daniel Arasse’s “we can’t see a thing!” Take a closer look, because there’s got to be something there and it’s time.

It’s within this “nothing to see here” that things are actually taking place.

My assistant on this project, Mathieu Redelsperger, a student at the Nancy Beaux-Arts and participant in the research and creation studio Electroshop that I co-run with Samuel Bianchini, has a reading of the piece that crosses Freud’s “uncanny” with Henri Michaux’ relationship to time.  I would really like to see this piece relocated in other contexts and other public places, to see how it can react-ivate a space. This initial experience was an experiment, a laboratory study.

I thought of Christo and his wrappings in terms of how you use an apparatus to draw attention.

You raise the concept of an apparatus, that can be understood through Foucault or through Deleuze in terms of an arrangement (agencement) that simultaneously gives bodies both possibilities and restrictions. This notion has also been explored within the context of media apparatuses. In “What is an apparatus?” Giorgio Agamben discusses how the concept can be recast as the “ability to capture, direct, determine, intercept, model, control and ensure the movements, conducts, opinions and discourses of human beings.” As he himself states, this includes not only the panopticon, the prison, and the hospital as defined by Foucault, but also cigarettes, mobile telephones, remote controls, advertising billboards…Recasting this concept generates an extremely fertile line of inquiry regarding how to interpret these apparatuses, their entanglement with perception and conditioning, the control they effect, and the system of thought that generates them. A+ questions one such urban apparatus and offers a reappraisal of its constituent power relationships. In this way, it rejuvenates how we see and the related questions of how we move and behave.

With Christo, the monument is abstracted. A+ does not have the same message, nor does it use the same aesthetic. It takes up a preconceived apparatus in order to reverse its method of operation. This approach is not only about objects: for years, I’ve been creating works that are not exclusively displayed within traditional artistic spaces—gardens, museums, public events… Dépli, a work I produced at the beginning of the year, was installed in a cinema but it overturns the cinematic apparatus and suggests another type of projection for and relationship with spectators. Outside lectures, a series of performances, was installed within the theater in order to explore various apparatuses such as the television. Each time, eruptions and emergences can be conveyed where they’re least expected.

Displacement (décalage) appears to be the dictum.

I don’t really like this word. For me, this intention is resolutely political. It’s all about reassessing the way we look at objects or situations.

Displacement to the extent that it leads to a different point of view.

In A+, one representation is torn down and another built up. When you realize that it’s been built, you understand that you’re already firmly in the grasps of its operating mechanism.

What are your upcoming projects?

The installation Open Source is being hosted by the Monaco Pavillion for the 2008 Expo Zaragoza from the 14th of June to the 15th of September. It’s an interactive video installation allowing for a collective writing situation around a pool of water. This summer at the Avignon Festival, Outside lectures will continue in the context of the Rencontres de la Chartreuse, from the 15th to the 23rd of July. In September, a new installation, Step to step, created with a fitness coach will be shown at a personal exhibition at the Rennes École des Beaux-arts from the September 26th to October 15th. And on the 29th of November, the new version of Réanimation, a performance and installation for dancer and spectators that I co-created with Samuel Bianchini and Sylvain Prunenec in the context of the Electroshop studio at the École national Supérieure d’Art de Nancy, will be presented at the Espace Pasolini in Valenciennes.

Given my training as an architect, and my ongoing practice with sound and music, working with digital processes is but one aspect of my work. What I am most interested in is working with the “theater of relationships” that are not necessarily exclusively interactive. This is one of the issues we will be faced with in the years to come: constantly opening the lid on and being watchful of the term “digital art” which continues to produce a veritable ghetto. We should defend the need to explore and interrelate what is digital and what isn’t, within the same work, while institutions, curatoring, and funding tend, conversely, to limit and restrict this field. My work covers video, installations, performances. I never think beforehand in terms of digital or non-digital. This question is fundamental to me.

[1] Mise en abyme is a literary technique in which a particular situation or context contains a reduced copy of itself, as when an image is multiplied infinitely by two opposing mirrors. “Mise en abyme: Term from heraldry, meaning the reduced reproduction of an image within itself. It was popularized by Gide to refer to a similar phenomenon in literature (play within play, novel within novel, etc.) and featured prominently in the Nouveau Roman.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Chris Baldick 2001, 2004.

Cyril Thomas / En avant vers Step to step !

Publié le 26/11/2009 dans Textes

Texte de Cyril Thomas pour la publication Step to step, Presses de l’École des beaux-arts de Rennes, 2008

step-to-step_19Tandis que la console Wii et la plateforme qui l’accompagne, le Wii Balance Board, font les beaux jours de l’entreprise Nintendo depuis 2007, dans le champ artistique, un plasticien repense les fondements même du divertissement sportif en l’associant aux expérimentations des années soixante et soixante-dix initiées par des chorégraphes tels qu’Yvonne Rainer . Un socle blanc pour poser ses pieds, une vidéo sur laquelle un professeur de gymnastique enseigne une séquence d’aérobic sur un « step », des capteurs, voici en quelques mots, la nouvelle installation de Thierry Fournier réalisée à Rennes. Pas de mise en valeur d’un corps sportif lié au jeu, il s’agit avec cette oeuvre multimédia d’oublier le ludique pour se concentrer sur une certaine forme de gestuelle et de danse.

La gestuelle du spectateur sollicité par le dispositif vient perturber le déroulement de la narration filmique. Thierry Fournier détourne la leçon de « fitness » qui dès lors perd son objectif initial et plonge le spectateur, sorte d’apprenti gymnaste dans un état de latence, dans une incompréhension. Le spectateur est prisonnier d’un paradoxe initié par l’artiste car le corps en mouvement devient l’instrument qui interfère avec la vidéo, la brouille, la ralentit jusqu’à un seuil presque critique : l’arrêt. Filmé en plan fixe, sur un fond neutre (qui annule presque toutes les références aux K7 et DVD de fitness vendus depuis les années 80), la séquence du « coach » contient intrinsèquement une matière burlesque liée à la répétition et à l’insistance sur certains mouvements reproduits inlassablement. Le ralenti exerce le rôle d’un révélateur en accentuant ostensiblement le comique. Le professeur se métamorphose en un automate victime d’avaries. Pièce qui serait atypique pour cet artiste, si elle ne dévoilait pas rapidement son enjeu : la cadence . En effet, dans cette production, l’activité sportive est envisagée par le biais de deux extrêmes : l’agitation frénétique et la lenteur voire la langueur. Ce rapport apparaît clairement sur les parties sonores : le rythme de la musique techno se modifie. Elle renonce à toute régularité tandis que la litanie des encouragements et des indications de l’animateur sportif se mute en une espèce d’ânonnement. Le dispositif entraîne le spectateur dans un premier temps dans une appréhension spatiale, liée à la relation entre lui et l’écran (c’est-à-dire au déplacement du spectateur sur le socle) pour progressivement l’amener à réfléchir au mouvement par le biais du ralentissement du geste filmé puis à la temporalité. Ainsi, la cadence de la musique perçue (de la techno aux mesures régulières) et celle de la voix se distordent et soulignent l’étirement progressif de l’action filmique. Cette lenteur parasite le discours, l’élan et l’entrain de l’animateur. De ce brouillage naît une focalisation sur le rituel, la répétition et la syntaxe convenue ; employés pour ce type d’activité. Step to Step renverse la perspective et invite à penser, non pas le corps dans les gesticulations et les trémoussements mais l’inertie, sur une cadence devenue presque atone.

Si l’installation intitulée Electric Bodyland (Festival Synthèse 2003) jouait avec les transformations sonores liées aux interactions, dans Step to Step, Thierry Fournier s’applique à décortiquer le lien entre sport et danse dans cette installation interactive afin de construire un appareillage chorégraphique. En 2008, il conçoit avec Samuel Bianchini et Sylvain Prunenec (chorégraphe et danseur) une performance intitulée Réanimation. Dans une approche plus liée à l’idée de résurgence des corps et de spectre, les spectateurs et un danseur générant la musique en temps réel se font face de part et d’autre d’un écran opacifié par l’image d’un brouillard. La présence des spectateurs fait apparaître sur l’écran des silhouettes noires et mobiles qui permettent de voir à travers elles. Step to step, pris sous l’angle de la sculpture, s’inscrit dans une lignée où le rapport au socle dans la sculpture contemporaine est questionné : de Robert Morris à certains minimalistes mais en passant par le Singing Sculpture (pratique artistique de Gilbert and George qui débuta en 1969 dans toute l’Europe avant d’obtenir la consécration lors du vernissage de la galerie Sonnabend à New York en 1971), par la Living sculpture (1972) de Gilbert and George et par l’œuvre Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) de Félix González-Torres . Ces quatre œuvres développent une thématique commune autour du geste, de l’amorce d’une danse en devenir, c’est-à-dire pensant le socle à la fois comme une surface où est posé l’objet à regarder mais également comme l’activateur d’une transformation importante : la sculpture n’est plus un agencement de matériaux, ou un élément isolé et travaillé par la main de l’artiste, mais devient le corps de l’artiste lui-même en action durant un temps déterminé. Le support de Step to Step reste l’interface facilitant l’interaction entre les autres composants de l’installation, mais il contraint le spectateur à ajuster ses mouvements pour concevoir l’ ébauche d’une chorégraphie. Par conséquent, Step to Step facilite la prise de conscience à la fois des mouvements physiques du spectateur dans le temps et dans l’espace, et des interconnexions, des parasitages que les gestes produisent sur le film créant une étrange circulation, sorte de ballet autour du socle blanc et sur lui. L’interaction conserve une place importante dans ce dispositif, cependant l’objectif final demeure ailleurs. Thierry Fournier décale le sens en proposant aux spectateurs d’assumer leur part d’indécision, voire d’opter pour l’inaction afin que la narration filmique puisse avoir lieu.

Cyril Thomas