LA QUESTION
Video display, discussions
6-7-8 February 2003
Curator : Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley

Light design
Mårten Spångberg and Tor Lindstrand

The critical approach in force in the late 1980s tended to elude debate over the specificity of the medium and, instead, to set out the more or less primitive work being done around the principles of crossover, displacement and other forms of deterritorialisation.
This attitude, deriving from an oblique reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and based in part on the politics of multitudes, ultimately served only to produce another ontological void, no less than a new standard, that of the "and" instead of the "or" and the "yet again" - another system of values, of communication, another way of sectoring off artistic and curatorial practices.
Today, this intellectual failure to deal with the medium as one of the issues in art has brought us round to a reconsideration of the contexts in which, nevertheless, we are still active, and to a rethinking of the specific use that we make of art as a moment, of technology as an agent.
The invitation issued by Le Magasin to create a space around video that is both discursive and spectacular implies that we pose the question of the medium in a different way, not in terms of its boundaries, but in its relations with the production of images, realities, events and commentaries. The Question, here, is thus the question of language, of the effective time needed to see, show, record and translate, or again, to fend off the boredom that is inevitably a part of this exponential sum of movements that are already planned, already projected.
This question also belongs in a transitional space in which the orderings and methods of exhibiting video seem to be exhausted with every attempt. Looking beyond the simple list of available configurations - multiple screens, flat volumes, embedding, twists and special effects, dislocation, etc. - between the white that is too bright and a black that is never dark enough, the effort is not to make visible the image as it is, but its machinery, its present, the space and the period from which it comes.

The sequence created for Le Magasin features a selection of videos that all touch on this commmonplace of "absolute contemporaneity", articulated around the sole criterion of persistence: what comes to me, what stays with me, what resists me.
Using a twofold method of projection and fragmentation, the idea here is to show up the gap between the forms of communication and those of art, to show a passageway between the unique (projection) and the dissociated (sampling), between the production of the object and self-production.
Through a series of conversations, various contributors (artists, curators, critics) will take up position within this structure, in a kind of radiophonic-televisual time frame that both interrupts and reinitiates the flow of images, and that generates potential forms of scripts, stories and commentaries.
The lighting design by Mårten Spångberg for the set of spaces works literally on the deconstruction of the primary syntax of video images - the expanded off-camera, saturation, encapsulation, feedback, repetition and simultaneity.

Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley