"Report from Grenoble. City of cineastes"
Art in America, New York, September 2006, p.60-65
"Cinéma(s)", a recent exhibition in Grenoble, brought together three generations of artists who have explored video- and film- based imagery.
Over the past several years we have been bombarded by what has come to be called "projected image" work-by the all-pervasive presence of the video screen and its concomitant modes of production, display and address-without really having had the chance to figure out how to place it in any overall historical trajectory. A recent exhibition, organized by director Yves Aupetitallot at Grenoble's Magasin - Centre National d'Art Contemporain, has provided us with a means to unravel the context for some of the most interesting work in this genre. "Cinéma(s)", on view through the winter and spring of 2006, examined a single, if remarkably rich, strand of cultural activity linked to this provincial capital at the foot of the Alps, which over the past 30 years has concerned itself with cinema-its tools as well as its means of creation and its contents.
Collaborative production was one innovative strategy evident in these works, from the group effort in the 1970s of Jean-Pierre Beauviala and Jean-Luc Godard that resulted in the creation of a 35mm movie camera small enough to fit into a car's glove compartment, to the AnnLee project of the 1990s, which united a number of artists in the production of animated films that made use of this Japanese manga character. Another innovative approach was collective or communal reception-the idea that the artwork might serve to create or consolidate a particular group identity: Philippe Parreno's Speaking Stone (1904) addressed itself to the children who gathered around it as they sketched; similarly, in the mid 70's, the public-access cable television program Vidéogazette had spoken specifically to the inhabitants of Villeneuve, a neighborhood south of Grenoble. Together, these works and practices constituted one significant genealogical strand for the generation that has appeared on the art scene since the second half of the 1990s, and for the dominance of the "projected image" and, more broadly, of a cinematic language that has marked that generation's esthetic vocabulary.
The story told by "Cinéma(s)" begins with a set of questions being asked of documentaries in the wake of May '68 and the wave of cultural and political contestation that swept over France at the end of the 1960s. Those questions revolved fundamentally around the problem of how one might represent real events using the language and the technology of cinema-or rather, more accurately, of the moving image, whether videographic, filmic or televisual. In this sense the story might be understood to begin in the years immediately following '68, when Beauviala, then a young engineer, set up a company called Aäton, in Grenoble, to produce the sort of camera equipment being demanded by experimental filmmakers and documentarists. His goal, as he explained it, was "to make a camera that allows entering into situations and being with those you are filming", and the result of his experiments was the famous Aäton 7A, a technologically advanced, lightweight and ergonomic 16mm camera. In developing innovative pieces of equipment, Beauviala also took up research in miniaturization, which led to the invention of a video camera the size of a microphone; he nicknamed it "la Paluche" ("the hand"), since it functioned as an extension of the arm of the cameraperson. Simultaneous with this technical research, and similarly critical of the economies and esthetics of commercial cinema, local activists in the Villeneuve housing project created Vidéogazette (1972-76), one of the first neighborhood television channels and a pioneering work of social experimentation; its programs, excerpts of which were on view in "Cinéma(s)", gave community residents a voice in a spirit close to that of Beauviala's dream of "a real labor of representation [mise en image] with the people who are going to watch their broadcast in the evening."
So by the middle years of the 1970s Grenoble had already become a center for experimental work on the electronic image, activity that was just one aspect of the fertile atmosphere for cultural experimentation present in this city under the mayoralty of Hubert Dubedout (1965-83), who transformed Grenoble into a laboratory of pragmatic municipal socialism. It was that atmosphere, and more specifically the presence of Beauviala, that brought Jean-Luc Godard and his partner Anne-Marie Miéville to Grenoble in 1974, where they would live and work until 1978. Godard and Miéville's move from Paris coincided with their desire to leave cinema and nurture their growing interest in video and television-or rather, their interest in creating a new critical hybrid of film and video. As Godard once explained, he wanted to use video "like someone from film and use film like someone from television," in order to "make a kind of television that doesn't exist, a cinema that no longer exists."
Working in this space between "not yet" and "no longer" Godard and Miéville embarked on a remarkable exploration of the potentials of new video technology. In Grenoble Godard would direct Number Two (1975), which combined film and video in an examination of the state of society based on the everyday life of a young couple living in Villeneuve, where he too was living. (This neighborhood of public housing to the south of the city had been designed in the early 1970s by a team of architects working in collaboration with sociologists, urban planners and teachers; it quickly became an island of socialism, sheltering many militants born of May '68.) These years also saw Godard and Miéville co-direct two series shot in video for French television: "Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication" (1976), a reflection on communication and specifically on the production, broadcast, and reception of news on TV; and "France! tour/détour/deux enfants" (1977-78), produced for the 100th anniversary of a famous schoolbook from the later 19th century that aimed at the civic, geographic, scientific, historical and moral education of French children. In the Magasin's exhibition, an entire room was devoted to the continuous screening of these two "anti-televisual" series.
All these experiments, and the ongoing, varied tradition that they generated, seem to have nourished the curriculum and informed the ambience of the city's art school, the Ecole supérieure d'art de Grenoble: some of the artists trained there have turned to the world of film, while others have approached the visual arts with tools adapted from cinema. This tendency was only reinforced by the presence of Ange Leccia, who taught at Grenoble from 1984 to 1997. In much of his work, Leccia appropriates and juxtaposes images of different kinds in order to twist their meanings; sometimes this is done in an evident spirit of critique, reflecting on the falsifications of the media (as in his looped splitscreen video, True Romance, 1993, which pairs Japanese news footage of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia with that of the much-publicized breakup of a star television presenter and a famous sumo wrestler), but more often it is done as a means toward a more personal exploration of memory and emotion. His large color photograph November 1963 (1983) juxtaposes two sets of images that coincidentally appeared in that month and year: the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination and Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. On the left-hand side of this work we see three stills from the former, capturing the horrific moment after the shooting as the First Lady reaches back over the trunk of the presidential convertible, paired on the right with three shots from the Godard movie. These derive from different passages in the film: two show the crucial moment, early on, when Camille (played by Brigitte Bardot), at the instigation of her husband, drives off in the sports car of American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance); another is taken from the tragic final scene in which the car is crushed in an accident with a truck, killing both Camille and Prokosch. Godard's fiction and Zapruder's reality (which some believe to be an elaborately staged, conspiratorial fiction), the American dream and its violent demise, are all bound together here through Leccia's work on the image.
Around personalities like Leccia, young artists at the school took up the questions of cinema-or perhaps we should say questions of cinema(s) and brought them into the domain of art. One of the most significant areas of critical investigation was modes of production: among these students we find a proliferation of collaborations and collective works, reminiscent of the group effort involved in any cinematic project. Bernard Joisten, Philippe Parreno, Philippe Perrin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Pierre Joseph-all of whom graduated in the later 1980s-joined together for projects in common, including "Siberia," "Ozone" and others. These have an almost legendary status in the French art world, initiating the concern for conviviality and interactivity that would later become known as "relational aesthetics."' "Ozone" especially-a collaboration of Gonzalez-Foerster, Joisten, Joseph and Parreno, realized in 1989 at the APAC in Nevers under the sponsorship of Eric Troncy-demarcated the boundaries of the exhibition-as-film, consisting of a functional "set" that the visitor was invited to use in order to create new forms and situations. Although the decor of this group exhibition was unfortunately unavailable for "Cinéma(s)", having been destroyed in a fire at the FRAC Corsica, the show did feature the related Video Ozone (1989), equally a collaboration of the four participating artists-an admittedly pale expression of this exciting moment, when a new generation of French artists was investigating novel models for the production, presentation and reception of the artwork.
A better sense of that time was provided by the display of their (rarely seen) individual early works, which occupied the large central gallery of "Cinéma(s)". Dominating the room was Perrin's Know Your Rights-Homage to Jacques Mesrine (1991), an installation that re-created a notorious French fait divers of 1979, when police killed professional criminal and "public enemy number one" Mesrine in a hail of bullets at the Porte de Clignancourt on the outskirts of Paris. Perrin re-creates the death scene, with a silver BMW sedan identical to that in which Mesrine was killed, its windshield riddled with bullet holes. Only the corpse is missing; the car stereo blasts the caustic 1982 Clash anthem, "Know Your Rights", a phrase that is also spraypainted on the wall behind this tableau. To the side are piled reproductions of various French newspapers reporting his death, which the visitor may take away.
The work is undoubtedly (and, one supposes, intentionally) simplistic and lurid, particularly when one thinks of the remarkably subtle handling by Perrin's contemporary Pierre Huyghe of a similarly sensational crime (The Third Memory, 1999, which takes up the case of John Wojtowicz, whose bank robbery was fictionalized in the film Dog Day Afternoon), but it nonetheless embodies some fundamental characteristics of the work of this generation: first, and most significantly, an interest in the collapse of clear distinctions between fiction and reality in a media-saturated visual environment (Mesrine had been something of a media anti-hero, a subject of fascination particularly on the Left); second, the use of "characters," whether historical (as here) or contrived, as avatars that the artist might adopt at will (and certainly Mesrine is the subject of considerable identification on the part of Perrin, who styles himself a "bad boy" of the French art world); and lastly, an absorption in an adolescent world of fantasy and transgression as a counter to the adult world of responsibility and work (it seems no coincidence that Mesrine's death and the Clash song featured in the work would both have been experienced by Perrin when he was 15 or 16 years old).
Some of the same themes are found in more nuanced form in Parreno's "No More Reality" (1991/ 2006), a phrase found stenciled in glossy white letters on the wall of a nearby gallery. "No More Reality" was a diverse series of projects initiated by the artist in 1991 and continued through 1993, the most resonant of which was perhaps the first: a short video of young schoolchildren staging a demonstration, chanting the slogan "no more reality!" and holding banners with the same stenciled phrase. (Concretely, they were protesting in favor of Christmas celebrations in September or, alternatively, snow in summer.) Originally, curator Aupetitallot had planned also to include the set from Parreno's film The Night of the Heroes (1993), in which an art historian descends into madness while writing a history of modern art; the set becomes an independent element in which the visitor can play, reactivating the props and restaging the drama (at one point, for example, Parreno had a group of children reshoot the film here).
In the end, it unfortunately could not be included in "Cinéma(s)", but a similar emphasis on the artwork as a kind of stage or film set that has been temporarily abandoned and that must be reactivated by the spectator is apparent in Parreno's Drawing Glass: The Speaking Stone, which occupied a corner of the large central gallery opposite Perrin's installation. Folding seats are arranged in a semicircle facing the wall, on which a set of drawings has been pinned; on the floor, between seats and wall, is the subject of all these drawings: an artificial stone that "speaks," delivering a long lecture on the status of representation in esthetic thought and in the cognitive sciences. But The Speaking Stone might also be understood to encompass an autobiographical element, a recollection of Parreno's own earliest artistic education. As a teen he, along with Gonzalez-Foerster, attended Grenoble's Lycée Emmanuel-Mounier, which throughout the 1970s was an experimental school renowned for its innovative curriculum; the drawing teacher there, Pierre Casalegno, had organized an open studio-accessible around the clock and very free in its pedagogy-that both artists frequented.
The sorts of collaboration and production that these Grenoblois art students pioneered in the later 1980s and early 1990s has of course become one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary art scene. "Cinéma(s)" featured perhaps the most exemplary instance of this particular mode: the AnnLee series, begun in 2000 when Parreno and Huyghe bought the rights to a manga character after discovering it in the catalogue of the Japanese graphics company Kworks. They then-with the somewhat paradoxical exhortation to "Free AnnLee"-entrusted her to other artists who, either individually or in groups, made films or objects with her.' The Magasin's show included three of the resulting anime films: Gonzalez-Foerster's AnnLee in Anzenzone (2000), Liam Gillick's AnnLee You Proposes (2001) and Pierre Joseph and Mehdi Belhaj Kacem's Theory of the Trickster (2002). Also included was a set of silkscreened posters for these and other AnnLee films produced by the Parisian graphic design firm M/M, which often works with Huyghe and his collaborators. The gallery in which these films were screened functioned as a curious pendant to the Godard room at the opening of the exhibition. On one hand, the visitor was made aware of the great distance separating his experimental television series of the 1970s and his desire to contribute to the broader political project of emancipating human subjects from the conditioning imposed by dominant ideological apparatuses (whether school, home or television itself), from the almost absurd wish to "free" a lifeless digital avatar. On the other hand, however, the Annbee series encouraged the viewer to look back on Godard's work with different eyes, and made apparent the degree to which his subjects were curiously puppetlike, little more than empty shells mechanically responding to his insistent questions.
"Cinéma(s)" concluded with Ghost of Asia (2005), a film installation made by artist Christelle Lheureux (a 2000 graduate of the Grenoble art school) and Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a response to the tsunami of 2004. They imagine a ghost (played by actor Sakda Kaewbuadee) who wanders around the shores of an island devastated by the wave, and invite three children to make a movie with him: the ghost, like a puppet, performs whatever tasks they dictate to him-not unlike, perhaps, AnnLee under the command of her artist-liberators. The film is projected on two facing walls, one of which shows the children giving the commands (pick flowers, lie down and eat the flowers, play soccer, drink water, etc.), the other the "ghost" who obeys them. As the artists describe it, "the film is structured according to the kids' real-time direction pattern. The actor became their simulated life, their projection of possible things one can do." Lheureux and Weerasethakul utilized some of the same strategies found in the work of the Grenoble cohort-collaborative production, new use of the apparatus of film, human subject-as-marionette or tool-in a more tender vein as a means of therapy for a physically and psychically ravaged part of the world.
This exhibition marked the inauguration of the renovated Magasin, which was founded in 1986 and which over the past 20 years has hosted numerous innovative shows of contemporary art in its home, the Halle Eiffel, a dramatic glass-and-iron shed designed by the studio of Gustave Eiffel for Paris's 1900 Universal Exposition. (After the fair it was dismantled, transported to its present site, and reconstructed to serve as a warehouse.) Closed since the end of 2004 for renovations, it reopened in January of this year with "Cinéma(s)", an appropriate celebration of Grenoble's place in recent French culture. Curator Aupetitallot deserves a great deal of credit for mapping out that place, and for suggesting its broader significance within contemporary artistic practices. In an exhibition culture currently dominated by an international circuit of contextless biennials, art fairs and megashows, "Cinéma(s)" offered a convincing alternative that drew attention to the local and place-bound nature of innovative artistic practices; it is a model that we can only hope is taken up for the exploration of other histories of our present moment.