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Less Ordinary _ French Contemporary Art
2002_04_27 ~
2002_06_23
Organized by Artsonje
Officially sponsored by Renault Samsung
Sponsored by Samsung Techwin , Tower hotel , Kiehl's , TG
, MIS KOREA
Support by  
Artist _
Alain Bublex, Dominique
Gonzalez-Foerster,
Valery Grancher, Marine
Hugonnier,
Pierre Joseph, Koo Jeong-A,
Matthieu Laurette, Natacha
Lesueur,
Mathieu Mercier, Melik
Ohanian,
Alexandre Pollazzon, Bruno
Serralongue
kim sung won
The diversification of communication media, the phenomenon
of real-time information, and the convenience of international
travel in the world today have allowed artists to readily
form cross-border networks, and the same conditions have also
opened great possibilities for artists to work anywhere in
the world, beyond their regional foundations. Such global
"migration" is spreading over and above the traditional
political, cultural, economic, and geographical boundaries.
In such a context, the idea of organizing an art exhibition
that focuses on presenting a large number of artists from
a single country may raise questions about its curatorial
ramifications. Also, and more importantly, the geopolitical
boundary of a "nation" cannot today - and never
did in the past - determine the aesthetic or artistic value
of the creative activities of artists. This is to say that,
the current exhibition runs the risk of being misunderstood
as one that attempts to define French contemporary art or
to represent it as a whole. However, from the beginning, the
exhibition was conceived of as an introduction of a cross-section
of French contemporary art as it unfolds, to the Korean public,
without a time delay.
As the curator of this exhibition, I focused on selecting
individual projects that would highlight the intensity of
the work and the originality and sensibility of the artist.
In other words, an adherence to a particular curatorial theme
or concept was abandoned. What was of ultmost importance was
the originality of the artist and the distinctive quality
of his or her work. Keeping this in mind, I surveyed and evaluated
the methods and expressive forms of the different artists
and invited those artists whose works I felt were valuable
and significant in the context of today's contemporary art
in France. The subjective choices I made will no doubt be
viewed as one possible perspective among many in evaluating
the contemporary art scenes. In Korea, however, I hope that
the sensibility and intellect of the invited artists and the
variety and originality of their work will stimulate productive
exchange of criticisms in the Korean art world.
Today it is nearly impossible to define the various scenes
of contemporary art under a single common concept or a unified
tendency. In the rapidly changing world, artists redefine
the different realms in society, in terms of art and society
and art and everyday life. They freely travel across the traditional
borderline between art and reality and suggest unique and
original views of the world. These artists have inherited
diverse, complex, and hybrid artistic legacy. They make use
of not only various art forms of the past but also further
enhance them. Their interests float between image and time,
uncertainty and certainty, the visible and the invisible,
concentration and expansion, disconnection and connection,
and the positive and the negative. As Marcel Duchamps has
pointed out, artistic concepts are constantly rediscovered,
and there is no exception today. In other words, no artist
creates a completely new work. However, artists do continue
to find new creative possibilities within their given reality,
exploring the uncertainty of the concrete time and space known
as 'reality', as they continue to experiment their desires
in that reality.
Pierre Joseph experiments with to what extent the utopian
dreams and desires of artists are possible to realize in reality.
In the 1980s, he used a "personnage vivant a reactever"
or "eactivated character", which was a performance
character - as well as the title of his work - in an exhibition
that became alive only to the extent that there was any reaction
to it. The artist motive was to eliminate the distance between
the viewer and the artwork in the exhibition context, to induce
interactivity. Pierre Joseph is now engaged in experimenting,
in real-life context, the possibility of the mutual exchange
he experimented earlier in the exhibition context. To experience
common knowledge and acquired knowledge and the difference
between them, Pierre Joseph has launched projects to learn
and personally experience about everything that exists in
this world. Recently in a solo exhibition, the artist exhibited
his "C.V." and announced a 'job wanted' advertisement.
The 'job wanted advertisement' (his art work) offers the artist's
resume and purports to respond to a job offer any time. It
is a moment when an artistic activity becomes a 'job' in reality,
and the 'artist' forever becomes an 'apprentice' in the world.
At the end of the 80s, the personnage vivant a reactiver suggested
new possibilities for art by attempting an 'exchange' between
an artistic work and the public in the exhibition context.
If this were the case, in recent days Pierre Joseph is suggesting
new "possibilities of life" through acquiring knowledge
and personal experience from everyday life and experiencing
complex 'exchanges'. Of course, artists reflecting their imagination
or desire on their work is not a new concept. However, experimenting
and experiencing imagination and desire in reality, under
real conditions and the attendant contradicts, are meaningful
ways of recognizing the world. It brings a new possibility
for real exchange between art and reality. "Satisfait
ou Rembrouse" is a work by Matthieu Laurette that turns
the marketing gimmick around and suggests an alternative model
to resist against the law of market economy. He also raises
a question on what is a 'nation' today and studies ways to
acquire as many nationalities as possible. The "Citizenship
Project" is an on-line and off-line project for collecting
and exchanging data on how to acquire a dual citizenship.
The ultimate goal of the artist in this project is to acquire
a citizenship of another country. Laurette's such projects,
which seem completely unrelated to art, are in fact the continuation
of the 'underground activities' launched in the niches of
economic, legal, mass media, and other fields of the modern
capitalism. The Bauhaus utopia of improving quality of life
through art brought us instead the equalization of standards
of life through expansion in quantity, not improvement in
quality. Mathieu Mercier utilizes this point in reverse in
his work. The artist observes, classifies, accumulates, and
applies the various forms of the equalization of life and
attempts to change the somewhat disappointing modern environment.
From the ordinary and cheap commodities that are mass produced
(e.g., light bulbs one can buy from a supermarket, plastic
wedges, chairs, and do-it-yourself furniture, etc.) to Flay
and Rietveld furniture of the 1920s, everything of the modern
environment becomes the object of the artist's observation.
With minimum intervention, the artist then transforms the
ordinary commodities into unique objects and at the same time
give them functional and decorative roles. In the background
of such works of the artist, there is an aspect of resistant
struggle against the condition of the life of the social class
determined by economic environment. However, the artist does
not use it as a slogan. Mathieu Mercier simply suggests new
possibilities for wasted cultural environment brought on by
the standardization and mass production of modern society.
Artists today, as they have always, do not hesitate to intervene
in and criticize social reality. Only, the method and process
have changed from the past. Artists today use websites to
exhibit their work in real-time, work with areas
that deal with advanced technology, such as internet marketing,
advertisement, video, and the works of disc-jockey and video-jockey.
For example, Valery Grancher, who explores the relationship
between reality and virtual reality, shows us through a symbolic
means the relationship internet forms with our reality. The
internet world no longer exists for us as a "virtual"
reality. We are already used to the new realm of time and
space that is real-time information and communication. Grancher
uses the internet, the product of new technology, to visualizes
the possibilities and limitations of the individual's experience
and perception in the face of another complex reality, i.
e., the 'virtual reality'.
Koo Jeong A's work, which makes visible what is trivial and
insignificant and gives meaning to it always
brings unexpected surprises. First and foremost, her keen
perception and interpretation of situation, context, and space
surprise us. In contemporary art, it is not easy to meet a
painting on a ceiling. However, in Koo Jeong A's case, one
looks up the ceiling, and there the viewer sees blinding traces
of circles reflected by light. Koo Jeong A's works start from
the realm that exists between the visible and invisible, the
psychological and physical, the fragile and strong, and the
complete and incomplete. The artist usually uses ordinary
and trivial materials and works on unnoticed spaces. The fragility
of her work infiltrate us quietly but spreads deeply. The
faint, modest, and almost invisible attitude of the artist
seems to question our fixed perceptions and our behaviors
and thoughts trained by habit. The small pile of sugar cubes
haphazardly strewn about at the entrance of the museum, the
act of filling up a hole in a garden wall with blue prescription
pills, the snow-white aspirin powder, and the huge hemisphere
of naphthalene may seem at first glance that they are there
by accident. However, it soon becomes clear that the selection
of particular objects for particular spaces form the value
and significance of the artist's works. The artist's selections
allow us to experience and meet the unexpected. Bruno Serralongue
works with photography. He has photographed immigrated workers
in France on demonstration to receive residence permit, the
"Free Tibet" concert held in support of the Tibetan
independence cause, the return ceremony of Hong Kong to China,
the anti-globalization and pro-human rights meeting held in
Mexico, the symbolic burial ceremony of Che Guevara in Cuba,
and the scenes of labor conditions in Korea. He has used these
photographs and 'reported' on the social, political, and economic
realities of modern capitalist society. The approach of the
work is similar to that of journalism, but the artist stands
opposed to the conditions under which the mass media communication
images are produced. Thus, the artist makes the order for
himself for the "news coverage", and the news scenes
are selected not from pre-made images but exclusively from
the choice of the artist. Moreover, the artist uses a large-format
camera, which means that he has to take photographs from a
fixed camera point and that the number of fast-photography
images is limited. In other words, the artist takes photographs
having intentionally eliminated the reporting privileges,
terms, and environment of photojournalists. For this reason,
the images the artist can select are not the kind of scenes
that are generally thought of as important in news events
and expected as such. We are flooded with the images of mass
media sensationalism and spectacle, and Serralongue's images
suggest a reality apart from the cliche of the news report.
The dry and impersonal images in front of our view are the
images of undeniable reality, even if they are unexpected
images, and they raise the question of the "truth"
of images.
Thus today's artists, who produce images of reality, visualize
the uncertain realms of reality, often believed to be certain
and firm. These images make visible what is invisible and
form various trajectories between the real and imaginary territories.
Melik Ohanian's images are, for example, such images. His
work provides various time zones through which a viewer can
form his own images. "Island of an Island", for
example is a work that films the remote island in Iceland
that was formed in the 1960s when a volcano erupted. The island
exists only as a research object for scientists. The images
of the island filmed from various angles in the sky are simultaneously
projected onto three separate screens. On the floor, as 950
tiny light bulbs slowly begin to render a drawing of the flowers
that once existed in the island, the viewer realizes that
she can see the whole image of the flowers through the reflection
of four semicircular mirrors installed on the ceiling. And
through a book of scientific data, which took three years
to collect, the viewer can visualize another image of the
island. There are then the images of the island fast playing
on the screen, the images of the flowers on the floor that
appear as they disappear and vice versa, and the images in
the book, which require another time zone. One cannot experience
these three realms simultaneously, nor can one have a completed
image. However, as the viewer sees the images in sequence,
the viewer forms her own images about the island. "sland
of an Island" works like a well-made film in which various
time zones and appearances co-exist without cancelling each
other out. In this way the work allows the viewer to experience
and understand the realms between the real and the imaginary,
the present and future, etc. This work objectifies concrete
and firm images, inducing the viewer's reaction to them and
prompting the viewer at the same time to rethink about making
images today.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's trilogy of films "Riyo",
"Central", and "Plage", suggests another
possibility for experiencing images. The images in the three
films are from the artist's travel to Kyoto, Hong Kong, and
Rio de Janeiro, respectively, and they are images of feelings.
"Riyo" has the image of Kamo riverside and the sound
track of the telephone conversation of a young couple. "Central"
has the images of Hong Kong and a women? monologue, while
"Plage" has the images of Copacabana reminiscent
of the festival period and three different stories on the
sound track. On the surface, these films are composed of image,
text (subtitles), and sound that one is used to seeing in
other films. However, in Gonzalez-Foerster's work, the three
elements form a space where the past, present, and future
co-exist and cross each other. "Plage" is a film
made while travelling in Rio de Janiero, and it films the
sea-side festival. In this film, the sound which seems to
be coming from a specific source, i. e., the beach, changes
into the voice of a man. The time zone of the beach-side festival
and that of the voices heard on the sound track cross each
other, giving the viewer a possibility to experience the images
that are different from what's shown or experienced by other
viewers. Thus the viewer could form his or her own image from
the film. Going forth and back between the realms of the real
and the imaginary through the film? parallel image and sound,
the viewer travels to a realm that "does not exist"
anywhere else.
The artists in this exhibition explore uncertain and incomplete
realms, traveling back and forth between the past and the
future. It is the way of life for the artists as well as a
suggestion to the public of a "possibility of life".
Alain Bublex's works, which seek for the time and images that
do not exist in real world, do not so much look for a new
or absolute form of utopia. Rather, the artist is seeking
for future possibilities from the standpoint of today, which
exists in the present and past. For example, "Aerofiat
is Bublex's future car. He combines a Fiat, the automobile
from the 1970s, and an airplane model from the 40s. There
is also the work "Tentatives", a collection of the
artist's exhibition ideas which "could have been possible
but never realized". In the "Glooscap" project,
the artist draws the images of non-existent, imaginary cities
on the map of Canada. The territories of these projects are
where non-real time and places co-exist. Alain Bublex's works
seek future possibilities from within history, and most of
his projects are incomplete. They remain as a "model"
or a "project"and exist as future possibilities
that could continue to evolve and change from the present.
Marine Hugonnier has been working on projects that merge future
into the present. To do so, she visualizes "the sensation
of the moment" when we instantly recognize an object
or its image. As the titles "Flower", "Candle",
"Tree", "Still", and "Interlude"
suggest, these are typical still-life subjects. However, the
moment we smell the dying candle while it is still burning,
or when a viewer recognizes that a flower which has to wither
with time does not, then we can cast away the images of still
life and enter into a different time and space. The still
life projects by Hugonnier suggest that the viewer transcend
the formal images of the objects and that she enter into a
zone of infinite time. In other words, in Hugonnier's work
the fixed and concrete images of still-life objects become
the uncertain and abstract "moments of sensation"
where we experience the present and future at the same time.
The absolute and restrained images of Marine Hugonnier, which
remind one of 17th-century still-life paintings, appeal to
the viewer's olfactory, visual, and perceptual senses to succinctly
introduce the viewer to the realm of the metaphysical. The
splendid and grotesque body images of Natacha Lesueur address
duality in a realm different from, or perhaps less metaphysical
than, that of Hugonnier. Lesueur separates human body parts,
such as the leg, mouth, face, etc., decorates them with food,
and photographically renders them with the sophisticated sensibility
of a fashion photographer. In most of the artist's body photographs,
which are covered with beautifully colored and shaped food,
the images of beauty and disgust, curiosity and rejection,
dissatisfaction and satisfaction, and humor and criticism
coexist. The reactions of the strongly contrasting emotions
to the artist's work are in fact the reactions we have to
the images of the body in general, including our own. Lesueur's
images seem horrible but playful, sophisticated yet grotesque,
and erotic and disgusting at the same time. The images of
such contradictions are both the reality of the bodies we
have as well as the images we experience as such.
Lastly, I invited two curators active in France to participate
in this exhibition. I suggested that Alexandre Pollazzon bring
his DVD project, "Video Traffic", which he recently
produced. The DVD project suggests a possibility for a new
form of exhibition that overcomes the space-time limitations
of art exhibitions today. Also, the 15 video artists introduced
in "Video Traffic" further add to and expand the
French contemporary art scenes introduced by the invited artists
in Less Ordinary. To Alexis Vaillant, I have asked that he
introduce in writing the contemporary trend in art, design,
fashion, magazine, internet, music, etc. for this catalogue.
Vaillant's on-paper exhibition presents the curator's unique
personal perspectives as well as various visual materials
to expand on the contemporary art scenes not introduced in,
but are closely related to, this exhibition.
Alain Bublex
The idea of a camera that does not record images came to me
as part of an artistic project considering photography in
general. At the beginning, this project considered the result:
the photographic image; then, evolved to center exclusively
on the act of taking pictures. The act of taking pictures
is about observation and awareness of one surroundings. As
such, the object that I intend to conceive to heighten one
awareness and attention should not be considered a camera
at all, but is a new type of product, an electronic product
that helps one observe better. My new product can be considered
an "Awareness Box". I notice that in my case, as
in the case of many photo enthusiasts, I take many pictures
but rarely look at them afterwards. (it is the same case with
video, which I watch even less frequently. As an artist, I
also use photography in my work, and there again, I take many
more pictures than I print or enlarge afterwards. I then asked
myself the following question
: Why do I continue to take new pictures? If I continue to
photograph, it is perhaps precisely for this reason, because
it obliges me to go 'there' (...) Therefore I naturally imagined
an electronic object specifically conceived for this use :
an <Awareness Box> that allows you to capture an image
once in presence of the subject, but without recording it,
since this is unnecessary. (...)Why do we take so many pictures,
is it to produce images or is it because it forces us to go
somewhere. .. what is really important for us, the images,
or simply observing the world? -Alain Bublex
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Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Une plage, la nuit - des gens habilles tout en blanc, La camera
longe le bord de l'eau et respire avec les vagues, on entend
une voix, qui se transforme lentement en chanson. On quitte
la plage et on commence a percevoir la rue, la foule tout
en blanc qui se deplace dans tous les sens. On entend une
deuxieme voix qui parle des dessins sur les trottoirs de Copacabana.
On survole les grands dessins sur les trottoirs, la foule
semble tenir compte des dessins de maniere inconsciente. Certains
dessins rappellent directement le motif des vagues. Une troisieme
voix raconte un souvenir sensuel. On revient lentement vers
la plage eclairee par de grands projecteurs, la foule en blanc
et des petits feux dans le sable. C'est maintenant la voix
d'un architecte qui raconte deux projets pour Copacabana.
On sent les batiments se construire sur la plage a travers
son recit.
Changement de plan - Exterieur nuit - Plage -
Explosions : Les gens au bord de l'eau sont eclaires par des
explosions colorees, ils regardent vers le ciel. Atmosphere
volcanique, guerriere et festive a la fois. La camera se deplace
dans la fumee et les explosions, la fumee s'eclaircit et on
reconnait les dessins des trottoirs de Copacabana - Mais les
explosions continuent. On entend une voix qui semble provenir
d'une radio. la fumee empeche de voir la foule, on revient
vers plage. On entend une autre voix qui parle d'utopie humaine
realisee... Les explosions sont terminees, il pleut. On se
deplace sur les dessins, d'immenses dessins de vagues en noir
et blanc, il y a beaucoup de parapluies, une impression de
comedie musicale spontanee. La foule se deplace... Derniere
voix : Un pecheur de Copacabana. - Copacabana n'existe pas.
- DGF
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Valery Grancher
"(...)As an artist, a word which sounds obsolete to me,
I would define an artist as someone reflecting over aesthetics
in a given reality, someone creating something. In my case,
I work mostly with media of all kinds, from video, photography,
sometimes advertisement, marketing via Internet and this rebounding
relationship with a reality of mediation perceived at the
individual level triggers my interest, more than the one understood
subjectively or in a phenomenological way, that is concomitant
realities, whether collective or societal which intersect,
their interactions with identity, memory, temporality, a given
space. The Internet is a rather specific media because it
allows strange situations as I said earlier which correspond
to moments of 24hours, localized or global spaces confronted
to a location and one individual experience. I certainly consider
the Internet at a more symbolic level in relationship to our
daily reality - I do not belong to a technological system
which consists of generating new technologies to be grafted
upon the Internet and thus supports the modern, progressive
or positivist orders- I am only interested in the human experience
brought up by this particular media." - Valery Grancher
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Marine Hugonnier
Marine Hugonnier's "Candle", which reminds one of
still life, is not a mere candle light. How the candle smells
when it is first lighted and when it is put out is the same.
The moment we light a candle, we smell not only its present
but also its future. Through a fixed and concrete image of
still life, Marine Hugonnier suggests an engagement with uncertain
"moments of experience," where we experience the
present and future simultaneously. As we step up to the quietly
burning candle, the image of the candle disappears as each
of us meets different images our own individual experience
brings us. Marine Hugonnier is interested in visualizing our
"sensation of time" in mobilizing the senses of
our vision, smell, and feeling. Recently, she took nine photographs
of seascape, looking toward Siberia, in a remote area of the
Bering Strait. From the Bering Strait, the International Date
Line, also an invisible borderline between today and tomorrow,
crosses toward Siberia.
Through the photographs in this series, Marine Hugonnier merges
future into a moment in the present. The artist has said "the
only way to maintain the moment is to observe its future even
for an instant." Thus, the works in "Towards Tomorrow"
are images of the sensation that pursues future while sustaining
the instant in the present.
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Pierre Joseph
"Artists do not look for new concepts. All we want is
to see to what extent the projects and the ideas of utopia
that make us dream are possible and to what extent we can
appropriately apply them in reality. Reality and imagination
should meet not in extraordinarily fantastic creations but
in simple but live realizations."
"The work for this exhibition is in a sense a practice
that began as a class project with the third-year students
at Ecole des Beaux-arts de Montpellier at the beginning of
last semester. I asked the students to imagine an office or
a workspace that they would use. The students, like designers,
suggested sketches of "designed "objects, such as
desks and chairs. However, because we are not designers or
furniture makers, it would have been very difficult for us
to make objects that could be used for practical purposes
and also ergonomically perfect. We decided then to combine
the designs we had and make 3D models. I have also asked the
students to think of their atelier spaces. The strange forms
of the objects were for their reassignment in the classroom,
the student's context. The result of this project was that
a virtual corridor was made inside a virtual atelier, giving
a birth to 'a work of art', and I, as a subjective camera
(a teacher), take a walk among the objects the students have
imagined." - Pierre Joseph
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Koo Jeong-A
For this exhibition, Koo Jeong A sent a picture of a person
whose identity could not be determined. It is hard to tell
if the light is a reflection from a mirror or if it is a flash
light going off on purpose to hide the face. We are accustomed
to what is visible want to know how this picture was taken
and who the subject is. It is a picture of a person, but the
viewer can not see who the person is. Thus the image in the
photograph generates frustration. The artist has produced
large-size poster with this photograph, which fills an entire
wall in the exhibition space. The poster has an intensity
of presence about it because of its huge size, but the content
soon escapes the viewer. Taking a very careful look at the
image, one might unassuredly begin to suspect that the figure
in the photograph might be that of the artist. If the work
is indeed a self-portrait, then the viewer can hardly predict
and barely recognize the identity of the subject. The portrait
does not show what is usually visible, i.e., the face, and
paradoxically show what is usually not shown, i.e. the artist
herself.
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Matthieu Laurette
For this exhibition Matthieu Laurette suggested the performances
of "The Spectacle Is Not Over" and "The 4th
International Look-Alike Convention". The former is a
2-minute video work that the artist himself has produced when
he was invited in 1998 by Chaine Spectacle, a French cable
TV, to participate in a program commemorating May 68. To make
a project for this broadcasting program, Laurette went to
Champs Elysees and had pedestrians and tourists read excerpts
from Guy Debord's "The Society of Spectacle". The
artist wanted the quotations to be read as if they were being
spoken. He therefore had a white board with the text written
on them, next to the camera, and erased the sentences as they
were being read. A pedestrian readily declares, "Reality
erupts within the Spectacle and the Spectacle is real!"
The image makes it intuitively clear that Guy Debord's criticism
that "he Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point
where it becomes image" is today a self-evident reality.
In the performance of "The 4th International Look-Alike
Convention", which took place on the day of the opening,
look-alikes of famous people have been invited to the opening.
They were treated in the same way as the real famous people
among the guests as they viewed the works. Art exhibitions
today have become a spectacle of its own, and as a spectacle
within a spectacle proceeds, the border between the fiction("simulacra")
and reality("the real") becomes ambiguous. This
work is a project which suggests paradoxically the statement
by Guy Debord that because spectacle is the whole it cannot
be felt at all from any particular position. The performance
was first introduced in 2001 at "Beyond Spectacle",
an exhibition at Centre Pompidou. It was then performed for
2nd and 3rd time at an exhibition held at Castello di Rivoli
in Italy and at Perth Institute of Comtemparary Arts in Australia,
respectively. The performance for the current exhibition at
Artsonje in Seoul is the fourth in the series. The photographs
of the performance are designed as film posters and introduced
in the subsequent performance. Matthieu Laurette plans to
collect the materials from the look-alike projects and publish
them as a book.
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Natacha Lesueur
The march of countless legs wearing fishnet stockings decorated
with sumptuous-looking food in this work gives the impression
of an advertising photograph at first glance. However, these
are not the slender and beautiful legs that usually appear
on advertisements for pantyhose stockings or women's shoes.
The 10-meter legs introduced in this exhibition also have
the ubiquitous eyes watching them, the eyes of the Barbie
dolls. In other words, these are by far not the images that
stoke voyeuristic desires in us. If it were not for the artist's
mise-en-scene of the various food items, the legs would not
catch our attention. They make up an image of ordinary body
that are unbeautiful. In Natacha Lesueur's work, the various
parts of human body are usually separated and decorated with
food. The artist then takes photographs of them in a manner
similar to fashion or medical photographs. The images are
glossy, exquisite, and beautiful in color, but its contents
are grotesque,
appalling, and frightful. There is a photograph of grotesque-looking
lips with a wrong color lipstick on them, and one sees beans
of various colors filling in between the teeth; there is also
a head covered with chocolate and fruit puddings; and then
there is the march of the unsightly legs in fishnet stockings.
These pictures do not make us desire the bodies we see in
them, but instead we are turned off by them. However, we soon
find ourselves smiling at the child-like, playful gestures
of the artist. Natacha Lesueur's images are definite and clear
in form, but as a matter of fact they do not provide the viewer
with a specific 'spectacle' or 'contents'. There exist in
the artist works only images that provoke the sense of beauty
and disgust, curiosity and rejection, dissatisfaction and
satisfaction, and humor and criticism. Natacha Lesueur's photographs
do not draw us into them, instead they pop out toward us as
if they were ping-pong balls. These body images ultimately
reflect our relationship to the images of body in general,
and to our bodies themselves.
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Mathieu Mercier
What we have suggested to Mathieu Mercier, who has said that
art is the most advanced form of design in all fields, is
to interpret and define the second floor exhibition space
of Artsonje for this exhibition project. The suggestion was
made for a project that would fully take into account the
artist's critical perspective that classifies and accumulates
the standardized cultural forms of everyday life and then
applies the result to create new cultural forms. The suggestion
also took into consideration the complexity of the means of
recognizing such a perspective. The artist started out with
six existing columns in the second floor space and worked
to add and position 23 columns of different sizes. In the
fan-shaped space of the second floor exhibition space, the
six columns had given a strong sense of its existence. The
23 added columns made the six columns disappear, and the space
became a 'forest of columns' with a trail for walking. The
pastel colors used to paint the columns are the colors that
are usually used for stairs, corridors, exterior walls of
low-income apartment buildings in France. They are the colors
with standardized and mass production codes. In the background
of Mathieu Mercier's work, there is an invisible social struggle
against the cultural environments and conditions of the low-income
classes, but the struggle is not a slogan that has a critical
message. Mathieu Mercier borrows and changes the reality of
our daily lives controlled by economic conditions and the
wasted and standardized cultural environment this reality
speaks of, i.e. the various forms of art in art history, and
suggests us a more abundant and original life experience.
For the second part of the exhibition, which will take place
at Artsonje Museum in Gyeongju, the artist has suggested exhibiting
a new work of 3D animation. A Rietveld chair breaks up to
pieces and a variety of geometric abstractions, which remind
one of Mondrian paintings, will unfold in a virtual space.
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Melik Ohanian
"Peripherical Communities: Capture Station" is aninstallation
work composed of a DVD player, an 8-tract multichannels, ten
headphones, and five LCD monitors. The artist has filmed the
'reality' conveyed by eight young people from the hip-hop
culture "slamming" and "rapping". The
images of the eight youngsters are separated from the sound,
and the two are edited simultaneously. It takes approximately
32 minutes (4 minutes x 8 persons) to transmit the images
of the eight singers, and the sound, separated from the image,
is played on an 8-track multichannels. The viewer can listen
to the sound only through the headphones, and the singer on
the sound track does not match with the image appearing on
the screen. At some point the image and the sound do come
together through a synchronization process, but only for a
splitting moment. The peripheral communities in the West signify
communities living on the edges of a society. The residents
in these communities are ready consumers of hip-hop culture;
they readily slam and freely express their 'reality'. Melik
Ohanian's "Peripherical Communities" is a work that
accepts as is the 'reality' of the periphery and transmits
it. The current work exhibited in Korea is the second in the
series of the artist's similar works, the first of which was
shown in Paris. Of course, the people who live in the peripheral
communities in Korea are not the same consumers of the hip-hop
culture as those in the West. The tie between the peripheral
communities and hip-hop culture that is strong and clear in
the West, therefore, needs redefinition in Korea. The hip-hop
culture and rap music that came from the United States have
been accepted and are being consumed in Korea. However, the
question is whether or not the hip-hop culture that has been
imported is properly meeting with the consumers who desperately
need it in Korea as in the West. If the answer is 'not yet',
it will then probably be a matter of time before hip-hop culture
and Korean pop culture become indigenous to each other. While
we are waiting for this to take place, Melik Ohanian's "Peripherical
Communities" in Korea will exist as a "capture station.,"
catching and holding the 'reality' of the temporary and fluid
communities that share hip-hop culture not so much based on
a certain geographical proximity as on the desire to share
one another's company. One might suggest, that it could be
this very unstable and uncertain territoriality and temporality
of a culture information that the artist Melik Ohanian has
seen as the reality of the peripheral communities in Korea.
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Alexandre Pollazzon (Video Traffic)
VIDEOTRAFIC
a video art screening tour by 15 artists living in Paris
with Boris Achour, Adel Abdessemed, Joe Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
Laetitia Benat, Kim Sop Boninsegni, Rebecca Bournigault, Franck
David, Brice Dellsperger,, Marina Faust, Anne Fremy, Bernard
Joisten, Ange Leccia, Christelle Lheureux, Georges Tony Stoll,
Jean-Luc Vilmouth
120 min
(...)Videotraffic is a travelling exhibition which is made
up of a playlist of digital data, presenting video works by
fifteen artists living in France. All of them share a distinctive
approach in which they have stripped their video works of
all the usual necessities involved in showing works of art
- sizing, editing, insurance, installation, and so on. In
designing the program, the idea was to return to the excitement
of early video art, to the Utopian visions of its first users,
and to create an exhibition that would be easy to present
anywhere in the world, in any
kind of space (in museums, art centres and galleries, but
also in cinemas, classrooms and even on television).
(...)
Videotraffic does not set out to announce the emergence of
a new art form replacing another, but rather to reflect a
new fact in art: that video and the cinema have many characteristics
in common. Boris Achour's 35 mm film shot at 150 images per
second, Kim Sop Boninsegni's and Ange Leccia's freeze-frames,
Brice Dellsperger's staging of a reactivated film scene, Georges
Tony Stoll's stage directing, Christelle Lheureux in search
of a film, Frank David's end-of-film credits, Adel Abdessemed's
war film scenes, Jean-LucVilmouth's improvisations, the frame
composition and its variations in Laetitia Benat and Apichatpong
Weerasethakul's works, Anne Fremy's aerial tracking shots,
the sound-tracks devised by Bernard Joisten, Marina Faust
and Rebecca Bournigault. All these belong to the world and
the language of the cinema. (...)
from the catalogue of Videotraffic
Alexandre Pollazzon, Paris-London, January 2002.
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Bruno Serralongue
The work of Bruno Serralongue introduced in the current exhibition
began with the artist's "investigation" on Korea
from Le Monde Diplomatique,which analyzes political, economical,
social, and cultural affairs of the countries in the world.
There are 23 issues from the 1980s until now that have special
coverage of Korea. The work itself consists of photographs
from the artist's "news coverage" of Korea while
he was staying in the country for a month last year. The artist
introduces 33 photographs of Korean political and social reality
taken from the perspective of a French. The photographs are
displayed with texts from Liberation in a 7-meter long photojournalism
format.
The photographs of the threelabor union members, who gave
the initial impetus to this project and remain core subjects
in the project, are the result of the project that began from
the news reports of the "Kim Woo-Joong Search Squad,"
which landed in France in the winter of 2001. The theme of
the project had already been determined when the artist was
still in France, and the current work takes a form of a follow-up
coverage where the artist has added a variety of pictures
of Korean society. The news of the search squad attracted
the artist's interest not because the artist is keenly interested
in political and social affairs of a society but also because
the French mass media showed overblown interest and enthusiasm
in the news. The mass media were not so much interested in
reporting on the cause of the three labor union workers as
they were on creating images of them as a spectacle. Today
the power of mass media produces images that are exaggerated
from truth and reality, and Bruno Serralongue intervenes in
this problem as a ?ews photographer. On one hand, his photographs
in this project assume the traditional role that photojournalism
plays. However, in his photographs one cannot find the well-known
images one can see on newspapers, because the artist consciously
excludes the special privileges the news photographers have
when they report. The heated atmosphere has died down, and
the question is what were the ?ruth and the ?ole of the images
created in the heat by mass media? For an answer, the artist
leaves us with only very neutral, impersonal, and dry images
along with a little bit of by-gone information. Those who
expect something definite from what they see will probably
not be able to find the answer in the images of Bruno Serralongue,
because the artist is suggesting a zone of uncertanty for
what we think is certain.
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