Press release

AUTO REVERSE 2
23 June – 8 September 1996

AUTO REVERSE 2 is the second part of a project conceived by Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley. The first act took place in the seminar "Auto Reverse, art and clinic of video devices" (May 1995), at the Centre Européen de la Culture in Geneva, along with a video programmation.
The exhibition will take place in all the exhibition spaces of MAGASIN in Grenoble.

ARTISTS
Marina Abramovic, Absalon, Vito Acconci, Hanspeter Ammann, Joël Bartoloméo, Vanessa Beecroft, Gerd Belz, Peter Campus, Michael Curran, Yon Duyvendak, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Mona Hatoum, Lothar Hempel, Joan Jonas, Elke Krystufek, Marie Legros, Urs Lüthi, Matt Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Kristin Oppenheim, Charlemagne Palestine, Daniela Pellaud, Pipilotti Rist, Radio Mentale, Josef Robakovski, Georgina Starr, Imogen Stidworthy, Sam Taylor Wood, Gillian Wearing, Jane et Louise Wilson.

"Art says what children say. It is made of journeys and becomings, also it makes maps extensive and intensive. It doesn't mean that an environment determines necessarily the existence of the characters, but rather that those are defined by journeys that they make in reality or in their mind, without which they wouldn't become ". This excerpt of "Critique et Clinique" by Gilles Deleuze is put in front of the proposition of Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley.

Departing from a reflexion on the aesthetics of the video medium, she reactivates a dialogue engaged between video and psychanalysis. Between auto-eroticism and oveoblect, the artist put differently the basic elements of a new terminology of the relation object-subject, of the being to its world. This video persona, which successively opens out, auto-corrects itself, auto-controls itself or slips away, corresponds in an other way in part- and it is where, at this crossing point, our problematic,- to certain therapeutic devices, practices named "videotherapy" or "videoconfrontation". (...)the apparing of the "vision machines" in the clinical space points the recurrent question of the image's status as mental process, as language process-the question of its enigma and of its theatricality - and reactivates the fundamental notions linked to every production of subjectivity.

The project is a journey for which the exhibition of works (video installations, projections, drawings, texts, diffusion of tapes) is one of the axes. It prolonges itself in a whole by conferences, publications, video programs which reactivate it. Twenty artists will be shown, whose works are exemplary of what Rosalind Krauss named "the aesthetics of narcissism". "Unlike the other visual arts, video is capable of recording and transmitting at the same time, producing instant feedback.
The body is therefore as it were centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis. The first of these is the camera; the second is the monitor, which re-projects the performer's image with the immediacy of mirror". From Vito Acconci to Marie-Ange Guilleminot, from Urs Luthi to Douglas Gordon, we are put in presence of a watching game in which we are also actors. Dan Graham has clearly expressed the analogies between these devices and some therapeutic practices, today, another generation seems at the same time to put a critical distance with this genealogy after having assimilated this vocabulary, which it re-formulates in another context. Then it is the case for Vanessa Beecroft, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster or Elke Krystufek.

In collaboration with the magazine Chimères, a special issue will be published after the exhibition. Chimères was founded by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in 1986.