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5/7/2002

La vie devant soi

Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier

Life Ahead of You, or: the Real Turned Inside Out (like a Glove) Having "life ahead of you" rings like a promise-a promise that things are going to carry on. It is the title of the exhibition that Ami Barak has chosen to bid farewell to the management of the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Contemporary Art Fund (Frac), thus creating an event in tandem with the Cimaises et Portique Art Centre in Albi. This exhibition is like part two of a theme proposed by the Albi venue in 2001 to a panel of artists: experiments with the real. Life is made up of realities and dreams-an interweave of real and make-believe. Fiction is a situation of the real. The real is the real. It is palpable life, with its theatre of cruelty, to paraphrase Artaud, with its cinema-to wax oxymoronic-of reversal; to do as the invitation to the opening does, bearing a photograph of a pilot being ejected together with his seat from a fighter plane, an image which shows something akin to a counter-performance-an imposed performance. Juggling with the signs of the real is an artist's trick, a clear artistic (mis)appropriation of a desire nowadays shared by many people involved in the art scene. It is no longer a matter of representing or re-creating the real, but of gathering it up in its most tangible goings-on, each one asserting its involvement by proposing a work for the occasion: they all turn the glove of the real inside out, and in the end form holds sway. It is 6.30 p.m. on Rue Rambaud in Montpellier. It is hot, and it feels like there will be a storm. This could be the beginning of a thriller, but it really is real. Outside, three trucks with their engines running block the street, their deafening noise violently irking the eardrums until the artist, Alain Bublex, gets rid of them at around 7.30 p.m. These monstrous agitators, these inhuman mutineers, protagonists in a one-off performance, are thus filmed for an hour by a closed-circuit camera, and the film then projected will represent the evidence of the crime. The door opens. Boris Achour plug some joystick on a play station video games, directly on the wall. The visitors can turn on the space galery virtually becoming territory Plug & Play. Ben Kinmont prepares the dinner menu based on recipes proposed by artists (Malevich, Dan Graham, etc.), incorporating actuality within a modern history, while at the same time reactivating one of our basic links with life: eating. Here, eating is also creating, two verbs which pen the history of man between nature and culture. Alicia Framis's changing cubicle consists of a curtain fluttering in the draught made by a fan, and is closed by a sensor that reacts to human presence. So the visitor can put on a special dress, but one that exists: an item of clothing invented so that Muslim women are clad against attacks from skinhead dogs. A playful-cum-tragic presentation of a violent situation where the garment symbolizes the double imprisonment of these women, while the curtain, for its part, is free. The destiny of the image, in its relationship to the real and to written memory, is lost in the series of videos titled Les souvenirs/Memories" by Valérie Mréjen. In Montpellier, an actor recounts a memory based on a true memory, which the artist has re-written based on the screenplay procedure. In a serried grid of real and make-believe, the idea of the memory seems reinstated, and we take part in it, pitching about between truth of the message, lie of the image, and vice versa. Begona Munoz quite simply asks the Frac Languedoc-Roussillon staff and the staff of the Albi Art Centre, along with the curators, to sponsor the schooling of a child in the Third World. She revisits the relationship of the patron to art, delivering her "statement" based on a humanitarian idea which powerfully echoes Romain Gary's book, La vie devant soi/Life Ahead of You (1). Otto Berchem undertakes an investigative task running counter to the reporter's job. He wants to get hold of the photograph taken by a whacky spectator who, during the 1999 Tour de France, caused the winner of that leg, Giuseppe Guerini, to have a collision and fall off his bike. The event caused a media maelstrom, but the snapshot, which was also that lunatic's "crime weapon", has never been seen. Over and above the object, it is the artist's approach which takes cognizance of a relationship to the real perverted by the media and madness, and this by trying to sidestep and reverse eye-catching customs. By way of a "Montpelier-Albi and back" board placed in the two exhibition venues, Asier Perez Gonzalez suggests that visitors might experiment with a highly "trendy" reality-car-sharing! Two fabric banners borrow Evian advertising visuals under the title Egalité Campaign/Equality Campaign: the manipulation of people in the advertising business is the manipulation of communications experts--division: politcal campaigns. With this proposition, Minerva Cuevas achieves a shift which repositions the real in its most opaque aspects, from which emerge historical symbols, from Vichy to the Evian agreement... Each one of these works is accompanied by an "acoustic notice" placed by Pierre Giner: a synthetic voice announces the titles, but in an unexpected and as if a priori impossible way, because it reinstates the accentuation. If digital "colour" is removed from the true-from the authentic-, technology, not to say technicity, tries, once again, to create a connection with reality, a symbolization which stems from the very issue of cloning and artificial intelligence. "The crowning piece" comes in the form of an eponymous work by Mathieu Laurette and Boris Achour. A rocket placed close by explodes at the twilight hour-about 10 p.m.. This is the final firework flourish before curfew. Tomorrow the sun will rise and life will carry on. "Art is what makes life more interesting than art", wrote Robert Filliou in the 1960s, and in the end of the day, what if it was the opposite, what if it was life that made art more interesting than life...

La vie devant soi/Life Ahead of you, curated by Paul Ardenne, Ami Barak and Jackie Ruth Meyer.

Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, 4 rue Rambaud, Montpellier. Tel: 04 99 74 20 35. From 6 July to 21 September 2002.

Cimaise et Portique, Departmental Contemporary Art Centre, les Moulins Albigeois, 41, rue Porta, Albi. Tel: 05 63 47 49 97. From 29 June to 4 November 2002.

The Frac is supported by the Conseil régional and the Drac (Ministery of Culture) Languedoc-Roussillon

Contact press > Martine-Hélène Gonzalez 06 62657728

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