Flambant Vu
Sept 12 - Oct 25
Natasha Nisic, Bertrand Gadenne, Rebecca Bournigault
Curated by Sylvain Campeau

Essay: Naked Projections. Bodies. Spectacles.
Sylvain Campeau



Bertrand Gadenne, La Bulle, 2002

It is tempting to begin with what a video projection is not, given the likely expectation that it will be measured according to the plausibility effected by a cinema projection. Let us say, first, that a video projection does not depend on the constrained immobility of the spectator, nor does it base its fantastical effect on the numbing of the motor functions. It depends, rather, on the fact that the viewer keeps his freedom of movement, that he moves and sometimes even enters into the field of projection. Nor, we might add, is it reducible to a narrative continuity that would justify the discontinuity of the shots and sequences. On the contrary, a video projection depends on the possibility of an attentive scrutiny of its subject. It suggests a piece of time and space necessarily ‘unhooked’ from its real flux. Facing a video projection, we witness a selected, worked, scene whose composite parts (proximity, traveling, zoom in and out) are freed from all obedience and submission to a story that might otherwise erase the cinematic effects in order to integrate them into a constrained (or literary) temporal and spatial order. The effectiveness of cinema projection therefore relies on the spectator’s obsession with narrative plausibility, in an extended and reshaped space-time that the action sequences form on their own. The fantastical effect is sustained by a mobility that is restricted to a visual investment, at the level of the imagery, the imaginary, and the fiction. The effect of video projection, on the other hand, is more on the order of a hallucinatory trance; here, the body is hardly able to resist coming into contact with the ghostly intangibility of the image, where it measures and loses itself as a mobile organ, equal to the image. It must also be stressed that we are no longer in the world of the analog recording but rather of the digital. No minute analogon of the scene reproduced on the screen exists as a screen-negative. Rather, the image depends on the scanning and coding of data. Given the intangibility of the pixel, with its unusual shimmering, the effect produced by these digitized points upon the reproduced scene is most particular. The combination of this sort of immaterial image with the materiality of the medium leaves the impression of a kind of peeling, volatile, and flying surface, an immaterial layer. The physical nature of the pixel also makes volumes appear as if they were "erased," as if the pixel's particular configuration, which is unlike the "graininess" of the analog image, encroached upon the volume and delimitation of objects, blurring them, in the end. Thus, when disproportionately enlarged, the area upon which the image rests is somewhat rectangular and out of focus. Consequently, the image exists as a mosaic of rectangular figures, a geometric monochrome, rendered as a surface thrown onto another, as a laid-down layer, as a minuscule stratum divisible into a puzzle.

Nevertheless, it is not necessary to set video projection against cinema in order to understand its character. Admittedly, videography may very well "confuse" cinema, but that is not all it aims to do. It can be used for purposes which are in no way related to cinema and which have nothing to gain by drawing inspiration from it, whether by counterfeiting or challenging the inherent conventions and rules of cinema.

Natacha Nisic , Attitudes: la salle de projection

Take, for instance, a white canvas stretched in a slightly darkened room. People squat in front of it in the hopes that it will come to life, as if by magic. A light behind it goes on and two-dimensional figurines, hugging the slender shape of the canvas, come between it and the light source. Of course, you lose nothing of the canvas materiality, even when it disappears in favour of what is brought to life upon it. You know that, in the end, you are only facing a stupid white canvas, but you accept in good faith the fiction created by the figurines. Video projection works this same way. The projection surface does not make you forget that it is a wall or a window. Moreover, it highlights the groundlessness of this process. In so doing, it creates a work that is saturated with an unfettered presence, stupefying in the impertinence of its appearance.

It is this presence that Bertand Gadenne's projections put into play. His Visage éclairé (Lighted Face), projected onto the windows of Galerie Séquence, Saguenay in the first version of Flambant vu, works in such a way that the body appears and disappears in the up and down movement of the light. 1 The image, appearing intermittently, seems to be born right before our eyes, extracted from the very substance of the translucent glass. The work therefore rests on a kind of impossible yet functional impregnation of the body onto the location, onto the screen. Everything here is a matter of light crossing, beating, as a senscient presence, an impression, always materializing/dematerializing. Thus, the body itself is a surface, merged here with that of the translucent window. This is not the first

time that Bertrand Gadenne uses the body as an obstacle-receptacle of the image. In Les Papillons (Butterflies, 1988), a slender spotlight comes down from the ceiling and shows only a blurry image on the floor. To make the image appear clearly, you have to intervene by holding out your hands, palms open. Only then do the butterflies show themselves, beating their wings with a fluttering of the image. This ephemeral pulse continues in La Bulle (The Bubble), whose visual rhythm, a forward and reverse action, is modulated upon a child’s breath as he blows up a balloon.

Natacha Nisic's La salle de projection (The Projection Room) and La salle d'attente (The Waiting Room) also seek to induce a fluid and innocuous presence. Each consists of projections of different human figures seated, in the former, a movie theater, in the latter, a waiting room. As they are shown, respectively, waiting for the show to begin, or for their rendez-vous to occur, these unwitting actors are the spectacle as they exhibit their impatience, boredom, or attentiveness to a film we will never see, or an individual we will never meet. These disengaged bodies, totally submerged in the passage of time or the unfolding of the film, are literally suspended outside of themselves, projected into a time outside of their own, immersed in the waiting and the expecting. Bodies in a trance of controlled attention, soul-less, they are both empty and pure presence. It is surprising to note here how much the situation is reversed. An actual, active, and mobile spectator is facing the image of a spectator totally involved in the activity of looking, with all the inertia that this usually entails.

Rebecca Bournigault’s video projections show the body compelled by a desire to entertain or to confess. Series such as Portraits. Lip Sync (Portraits. Lip Synch), Portraits. Vêtements, (Portraits. Clothing) and Portraits. Je t’aime (Portraits. I Love You) are staged, situational exercises wherein directives are given to a willing model. Instructed to explain where their clothing comes from, lip synch a particular song in a setting of his/her choice, or say in a heart-felt way, "I love you," to the camera, some participants follow these instructions boastfully, and some follow them uneasily or seriously. At times, the confrontation with the camera becomes unbearable while the subject waits, in vain, to know what the instruction will be and, at the same time, what the shoot is all about. During these scenes, our discomfort as spectators is palpable: The sound quality is poor, the gigantic image oversaturated with bright colours, and the poor victim, imbued with his desire for mimetic glory, swoons and struts about grotesquely, losing the rhythm, and stumbling over the words of the song.

These works address the same issues. They are all vividly candid, as they present their referent in a sort of transparent or blatant truthfulness that sometimes becomes a grotesque mise-en-scène. Moreover, they induce an uneasiness and discomfort as the fragility of the illusion of presence produced by photo- and videography is entangled with our own existential anxiety as to our sense of being here and now.

Footnote

1 This exhibition was originally presented at Galerie Sequence, Saguenay, in 2001 as part of the Quebec/France exchange. See exh. cat. Flambant vu. corps. spectacles, 2001 (Galerie Sequence, Saguenay).

Biographies

Rebecca Bournigault studied at l’École Supérieure des Beaux-Art de Bourges. She lives and works in Paris. Represented by Galerie Almine Rech, she has shown her work in Europe, America and Asia. She was part of Le Printemps de Cohors (France), the Festival International de Photographie in Brussells, the Bienniale de Lyon and the Bienniale of Istanbul. She recently had a solo exhibition at L’Espai Lucas in Spain, at Feria de l’Arco in Madrid and at Galerie Deux in Japan.

Bertrand Gadenne lives and works in Dunkerque where he teaches at l’École des Beaux-Arts. Represented by Galerie Aline Vidal in Paris, he has shown his work in Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal in 1997, in les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles (France); in le Printemps de la Photo de Cahors (France) and in the Photography Biennial of Israel.

Natacha Nisic studied in l’École Nationale Supérieure des Art Décoratifs an in Der Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie in Berlin. She was recently artist-in-residence in Villa Kujuyama in Japan. She was part of a group exhibition entitled "Contemporary Utopia" in Estonian Contemporary Art Centre in Riga; in Plan B, hARTwareprojekt, in Germany; at the Kyushu Contemporary Art Great Adventure, in Japan and in Le Printemps de Cahors, in France. She has had solo exhibitions at the Kunstbank, Berlin, at the Centre Nationale de la Photographie in Paris and at the French Institute in Berlin.

Born and living in Montréal, Sylvain Campeau has a Ph.D. in french literature. A poet and essayist, he has curated many exhibitions in Canada, France and Mexico. He has contributed to many catalogues and is also a regular contributor to ETC Montréal, CV Photo, C Magazine. Les Antipsaumes, his fourth book of poetry, will be published this fall.