It’s the feeling that this “unforgiving hatred” could invade a space that fragments into different worlds, and the sense of shifting from one space to another. There’s another exhibition that took its title – “Grands A” – from something that could be read later on in the show. There were two letter “A”’s written out, but they were illegible, since they were so large that the sheets of paper they had been photocopied onto could not fully contain them.
Where does your interest in movie posters come from? First of all, I definitely like the fact that they are very commonplace, mass-produced objects that have restrictions deriving from their industrial origins: a standard format, factors related to storage, circulation, etc. What I produce is primarily determined by these aspects. There are marks, folds, a grid; it isn’t a poster if it doesn’t have flaws. It’s a way for me to create an image that still says something about the time when these posters passed from hand to hand, when they were folded up and removed from sight.
So what do I do? I spray the back edge of the poster with paint, while unfolding them, opening them back up. And since these posters have never been perfectly folded, once they are entirely unfurled and turned around, you can see very light traces of paint on the back or showing through. Traces of the imperfect way they were folded, and one might even say, clues to the image’s slow apparition.
It’s true that the posters exhibited in the show are basically unchanged, my intervention is almost invisible. And these posters, though once commonplace objects, over time have become collector’s items. The work takes place after this change in value. At the Palais, I showed two posters for the film I mentioned earlier. One of them is signed by Cristellys. If I undertook this series, it was because the poster contains a green halo surrounding the strange, beautiful photomontage of the main characters in the film, a halo much like the trace you can make with spray paint. In a certain sense, I saw it as an invitation.
Clément Rodzielski, Untitled, 2008courtesy: Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Carlos Cardenas, Paris.
Your work on the posters encourages people to think about the impossibility of considering an image to be something merely two-dimensional. The images have sculptural, physical qualities. What is the status of the image, as you see it? This is an issue at the center of many artists’ work. Where do you think this need to pose ontological questions about the image comes from? I’m not sure I know how to answer that. Especially because I’m always loath to talk about “images”, to invoke that word. The first observation we can make, though, is that most images that are created today pass through a computer, whose specific characteristic is the possibility of rapid manipulation, so many errors are inevitably made. Just think, for instance, of someone putting a video on YouTube in 16:9 format when it was shot as 4:3...
An image is definitely more than just a pure surface. It slips away in all directions, and it’s never where it was before. For example, when I photocopy mirrors, or when I delve into the memory of a computer, it’s in order to no longer be in full control. Images show up in our world in specific situations – in magazines, on posters, etc.; what I do is to put them back into play and arrange a sequence of links between the source and what I have in mind.
I set myself a few restrictions, the ones set by the objects themselves. I can rely on tools that are intermediaries, such as machines, photocopiers, computers... I don’t try to hide the seams, the joints. I try to work with the specific characteristics of each of these communication tools or machines. And so the things – the images – are transformed. The risk is that these processes may produce empty shells, that the art may basically end up referring only to itself. But maybe that doesn’t really matter.
I’d like to underline three concepts you have brought up: shifts, traces, and the exhibition framework. The first two are concretely expressed in the Module at Palais de Tokyo, for example, through the marks left on the walls by the movement of the three MDF panels. what do these movements that have taken place and these marks on the walls mean to you? These three panels, which are independent, but similar, are completely covered by the marks of a very soft graphite pencil. In a certain sense, they are large drawings that paraphrase their backing – they are both objects and tools. They stand at the center of the chain, and sometimes at the origin of things, and that is why they still appear to be images and marks on the walls. It is not a performative action, it’s an “occupation” of the territory. It was unquestionably important that the work not be fully completed, and that the panels be exhibited in “Une Haine Sans Pardon”: even before coming into the space, viewers were confronted with the back of one of these pieces: one panel was placed at the entrance to the Module and blocked half of it, preventing the broader, direct view that the space would allow.
The third concept I mentioned is the “exhibition framework”, something to which you devote particular attention. What is the boundary between installation and exhibit design in your practice? I often deliberately add two or three “decoys”. I’ve always thought it was better to exhibit work in “imperfect” situations. In order to decompress and attenuate the usually unrelenting attention focused on the work. I find it very hard for things to just be there, subject to “contemplation”, just as I find it hard to say “this is the work, this is completely how I am”. Even though it’s obviously in that context that the work unfolds.
The exhibition is a critical moment, a moment of criticism: for the show itself, for the institution, for the place housing it, for the work itself, and so on. In the “Grands A” exhibition, it was hard to tell the “work” from the “non-work”; temporary partitions had been added that could look like part of the work, but were only pieces of wood, cardboard and other things on the wall. I think it was a way of “criticizing”, mocking the impressive settings you see at most major shows. I remember this exhibition, “Spector”, where the invitation, which in most cases primarily circulates prior to the event, continued to do so for its entire duration, becoming one of the elements in it. It showed a photograph by Arthur Batut – the inventor of aerial photography, which began with kites, at the end of the 19th century – who said he had “failed”, because in the foreground of the picture you could see part of the kite and the strange machine he had invented. In short, everything about the fabrication of the image was revealed.
