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.