Exhibition with Julie Béna, Mohamed Bourouissa, Benjamin Nuel and Éléonore Saintagnan.
The Old Police Station, London
September 23 - October 2, 2011
The Old Police Station
Legend, Mohamed Bourouissa, 2010.
Hotel, Episode 1, Benjamin Nuel, 2009.
http://benjaminnuel.com/hotel/serie/index.html
Le Cercle, Eléonore Saintagnan, 2009.
http://www.eleonoresaintagnan.com/lecercleflash.php
From dawn to dusk from dusk to dawn, Julie Béna, 2011.
http://thechannel.tumblr.com/tagged/performance
Barbara Sirieix and Josefine Wikström: In the early stages of your practice, you considered your process of working similar to that of a painter. Why was that important to you? Is this still an issue? If so, why? How do you relate the setting of video and sound installations, that you build up, to the contemplative experience of a painting?
Thomas Léon: The idea of painting came into my practice when I was a student and reflected on the use of images. I noticed quickly that there seemed to be a distance to and not much theoretical literature on these new “materials” (software programs etc.) Two discourses and modes of critique kept coming back. The first was an essentialist critique: computer generated images are to be isolated due to their “nature” of simulacra. They can only be used to create images with no substance, of a reality that already is disintegrating itself. The other critique is connected to its function: These tools are conditioned (inevitably somehow) by their use in the show business and the entertainment industry (movies, etc.). They can only produce images with marvelous or fantastic connotations. The common ground of both of these critiques is the denial that computer generated images can deal with reality.
The discourse around simulacrum (a concept developed by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard), was common because of the boom of new conceptual photography in the 90ies and the early 2000, which led to a re-emergence of the whole “classic ” theory on the image as print/trace, the relation to the referent, etc. From this point of view, computer-generated images will always be suspicious, “false” and more distant in their relationship to reality than the photographic image. Taking painting as a starting point or a model was a way for me to bypass this discourse. Painting has since the beginning claimed to be about reality although it is made entirely out of constructed images.
My reference to painting is also connected to the idea of showing video in spaces dedicated to visual arts. The status of the moving image in this context has never seemed obvious to me. The video must be protected from the light and so there is not much dialogue with the other works in collective exhibitions. A video has, in general a beginning and an end, or at least it is oriented temporally, and this time is rarely the time of the spectator. We have all had the experience of getting into one of these scary black boxes, trampling on the audience already there – which does not know whether to sit or stand at the back of the room – and to arrive finally in the middle of the video. My first works were attempts, with time and space loop systems, to create videos without beginning and without end, and to quote Robert Breer, which would have been “space-images presented during a certain period of time”. This initial position changed precisely because my works, despite the loop systems, the non-figurative sequences, continued to have temporal structure and direction. My work now focuses on a way to create a state of immersion of the viewer into the picture, which is very different from how one feels in front of a painting, as it uses means such as tension or drama (which are related to time).
BS and JW: Your videos often take a long time to produce because you build yourself the entire landscape in 3D modeling. It is interesting to put this in perspective with the pictorial tradition of Veduta(*) . What does it mean for you to work with landscapes?
TL: The landscape is an important part of the history of Western art and the relationship to landscape is relevant for so many works of art, including mine, that I feel it is too big of a question to discuss here. However, the Veduta interests me in particular because it crystallizes the notion of landscape with the question of urban environment and architecture. It is also interesting because it has an inseperable connection to the question of the means (or tools) of representation. In you look at the paintings made within this tradition you can see that there is this tension between, on the one hand wanting to paint objectively a precise portion of the visual field, with the perspective to be exhaustive, and on the other hand, the possible aberrations produced by the system of representation (the perspective). None of these are really reconcilable, the artist will still have to make choices, distort, assemble, lie a little. To be more specific, the vedute are usually related to a specific site, often recognizable (there were the early postcards). If I represent a specific building, it is often off-site in some way, by the isolation or the reconstruction of something from pre-existing elements: in this sense, my works are sometimes more “capricci” then vedute…
BS and JW: Some of the software you use are also used by many architects when they make models. What would you say is the main difference in they way you utilize these software from other professions as for example architects?
TL: The 3D modeling and rendering programs that I use, are used at all stages in the development of an architectural project. However, the software functions differently at each stage of the process because the objectives are not the same. One will use AutoCAD for the implementation of plans, SolidWorks and its modules for the studies of resistance and structure and then Blender, Maya, 3ds Max or LightWave when it comes to “sell” the project to be built. The software I use mostly belong to the latter category, (i.e. I belong to those who use 3D modeling to produce visibility). However I don’t have the same obligations in terms of time. 3D graphic designers working within architecture for example have very short time, while I can spend the time I want on my projects. Further are my objects of study generally unmarketable. And in terms of drama, I do not have the same goals. I do not, for example, need to magnify or describe a building in detail. I also do not use the formal vocabulary of architecture films, my grammar is more related to cinema and experimental cinema. Further I work in a different perspective than the process of an architectural project: usually within architecture design the images are meant to anticipate the coming architectural project, they are therefore in a way representations that come before the construction of the object they represent.
BS and JW: Your films can be described as architectural studies. Are they based on reality or imagination?
TL: They are based on reality, which does not mean that my work only represent existing buildings (by that I mean built). There are different degrees of accuracy and exhaustiveness with the objects represented in my films. I often start my research with photographies and topographic investigations on the field to inform the work, that leaves a smaller part to interpretation (although there are still choices to make). I sometimes work from maps. These maps may include buildings, altered or destroyed, or buildings that have been planned but were never built. Finally I sometimes work from some distant or reconstituted memories of a place.
BS and JW: In your film Living in the Ice Age, the last sequence is made out of film footage. What status does this last sequence have in relation to the idea of “reality”?
TL: My medium and the use I have of it are ambiguous in relation to realism. As I said earlier, in my graphics I use abundant photographic material whose connection with reality are made through the idea of the index or print (a certain direct relationship between an object and its photographic representation). I think it’s possible to go beyond this approach and, like with painting, the medium can give a constructed reality to see and the issue of realism as a political project to think. This video uses heterogeneous materials. The bulk of the video is made out of computer generated images, using photographic material on an organized way, with geometry. The end, filmed with a mobile phone equipped with a video sensor with very low resolution (QVGA: 320 x 240 pixels), is an exit frame for the photographic material, which loses resolution but gains in meaning. The two component follow one another as equivalent, although they are two different visions of the same building.
(*)A veduta is a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting of a cityscape or some other vista. This genre of landscape originated in Flanders in the 16th century. As the itinerary of the Grand Tour became somewhat standardized, vedute of familiar scenes like the Roman Forum or the Grand Canal recalled early ventures to the Continent for aristocratic Englishmen. By the mid-18th century, Venice became renowned as the centre of the vedutisti.
This interview is a complement of Urbans Ruins in The Age of Advanced Technological Reproduction at the Chisenhale Gallery.
Screenings of works by Thomas Leon (FR) and Thomas Lock (UK) followed by a discussion with the artists, art critic Kari Rittenbach, computer programmer Joel Gethin Lewis, critic and researcher Duncan White and curators Barbara Sirieix and Josefine Wikström.
Chisenhale Gallery, 21rst Century
November 10th, 7pm
Today any smart phone can, in only a click, make digital photos look like Polaroid pictures and films as if shot with a Super 8 camera. How does this ‘aestheticized nostalgia’ or ‘stereotyped romanticism’ relate to artists´ use of new and advanced technologies? In Thomas Leon’s and Thomas Lock’s works we encounter urban ruins and suggestive landscapes generated through a direct, almost mechanical, relationship to digital technologies.
In Lock´s piece Breaking Points — triggered by Paulo Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology—grand melancholic photographs of weather-beaten war bunkers on the French coast have been coded, through the use of the open source software Open Framework, in such a way so that they are randomly selected from a bank of hundreds. The result is a moving image, which, just like the topography surrounding the bunkers, continuously destructs and constructs itself. And in Léon’s film Living in The Ice Age, created with the 3D animation programs Lightwave 3D and Blender, an abandoned building is placed in the middle of a frigid landscape and as the sun rises and sets, skyscrapers appear and disappear behind it. Here the use of animated material allows for a continuous organic movement creating a melodramatic landscape.
Exhibition with Julie Béna (FR), Mohamed Bourouissa (FR), Louis Henderson (UK), Benjamin Nuel (FR) and Éléonore Saintagnan (FR).
September 23 - October 2, 2011
Open Wed-Sat 12 - 4 pm
The Old Police Station
114 Amersham Vale, London SE146LG
OPENING: Friday 23 September 2011 6 - 11 pm
EVENTS: Saturday 24 September 6 - 9 pm
6 pm: Science Fiction Narrative Forms
Screening of Louis Henderson´s film Capital and Éléonore Saintagnan´s Les Malchanceux followed by a discussion led by Barbara Sirieix. Both films are work-in-progress and the screening is a continuation of the on-line research that the two artists have done on the Channel blog during the summer.
8 pm: Rose Pantoponne
Performance by Julie Béna
For Channel, Julie Béna experimented first with the performance on the Channel blog. Instead of a live experience or the contemplation of its documentation, we explored, through each post on the blog, the backstages of a performance that we might never get a chance to see.
BAR and DJ organized by TECHMATTERS all through out the evening (drinks & French snacks).
Supported by
2011
© Julie Béna
Rose Pantoponne
Robinhood Gardens
Notes for a film called ‘Capital’
Louis Henderson
The word ‘cluster’ meaning a specific pattern of association has been introduced to replace such group concepts as ‘house, street, district, city’ (community sub-divisions), or ‘isolate, village, town, city’ (group entities), which are too loaded with historical overtones. Any coming together is ‘cluster’; cluster is a sort of clearing-house term during the period of creation of new types. Certain studies have been undertaken as to the nature of ‘cluster’. The intention of these studies, in which the conditions were largely made-up and not ‘real’ was to show in terms of actual built forms that a new approach to urbanism was possible. In other words it was to present an ‘Image’. A new aesthetic is postulated as well as a new way of life.
Uppercase 3, Alison and Peter Smithson (1960).
Notes for a film called ‘Capital’
Louis Henderson
