Galleries in Paris » Information Fiction Publicité

Essentially preoccupied with the social space where public

advertising totally blurs into the private life of the individual, and,

perhaps more importantly, the (then) extremely fashionable issues

of authorship, the work consists largely of three parts: their logo

(featured on sculptures and light boxes); images of the sky; and

advertising in various forms.

Grande Surface (1987-2010), is a vast billboard-size, green

monochrome wall painting. At the bottom right corner of the painting

is located the collection’s logo in white, next to a fold out seat, as in

a movie theater, upon which a single viewer could sit and contemplate

the sprawling frieze of re-contextualized, public imagery before them,

while activating, for the benefit of other viewers, the field of green

directly behind them. Together, the two offered a rather wry commentary

on Duchamp’s famous observation that the viewer completes, who in

this case, is literally instrumentalized by the work in order to achieve

said completion.

Le plot (1985), seems, at least in theory, to invite a similarly instrumental engagement/exploitation. These are basically small, round concrete plinths,

whose center’s featured mechanically rotating, metal plates, upon which is

painted the collective’s logo.

Difficult not to imagine a single viewer obediently standing on one

and, no doubt, expressionlessly, rotating like a human sculpture.

The motif that dominates the exhibition – the sky – (the group’s signature

image) just happened to be the most winsome motif of the exhibition.

Parceled up into light boxes, on folding partitions, and in a film, the

presence of the sky suffuses the spaces with an extraordinary and

inhuman, as in emotionless calm.

Ciel, station (1988), an overhead series of ten light boxes with images of

cloud spattered skies, spaced apart at symmetrical intervals. Evocative of

either a train window or say, a film strip, the installation is cause,

despite its elegant beauty, for a highly unnatural feeling.

One had the sense that the sky, and any romantic significations normally

associated with it, had been deprived of any content whatsoever, rendered

completely vacant, like a screensaver.

But it wasn’t until seeing a vertical, human-sized light box of the sky,

and after seeing a few images of inhuman spaces such as a desertscape

and a moonscape pasted directly unto the wall, that a preoccupation

with a colonization of space begin to assert itself. Indeed, the light

boxes of the sky themselves testified to the commodification of the one

thing that would seem to put up an indomitable resistance to being

packaged and sold. And yet here it is, streamlined into luminous and

entrancing segments of its own representation. Whether or not such

a critique was initially part of their project is hard to say– they were

notoriously uncommitted to any critical position, aside from that of

abjuring traditional notions of authorship. That said, if time has potentially

made a subtle critique of commodification within the work more

apparent, then one other latent aspect becomes even more apparent

than that: the memento mori. For what do these pure, artificial

representations (preservations) point to other than the extinction of

that to which they refer? Granted, these were made at the end of the

Cold War, post Soylent Green (1973), and above all, post Blade Runner

(1982), but the specter of ecological catastrophe, now psychically,

culturally and historically pushing down on them, has become a

thoroughgoing box office hit, not to mention an imminent reality.

However, unlike their spectacular Hollywood counterparts, the sense

of doom they both compactly and vastly invoke is wrapped in a peaceful

and impenetrable silence.

Chris Sharp

Except form the text “Information Fiction Publicité. L’épreuve du jour”,

published in the online supplement of Kaléidoscope Magazine, February 2011