|
Erna Hecey is very pleased to announce
“Situation Comedy” a solo exhibition by
Suzanne Lafont in Luxembourg at Mudam, Musée d'Art
Moderne Grand Duc Jean, as part of Mois Européen de la Photographie,
opening on Wednesday 16th February 2011 at 6 pm.
Suzanne Lafont’s room-size grid of coloured panels entitled
Situation Comedy takes as its starting point the 1971 booklet
Manipulating the Self: A Borderline Case, a small black-and-white
publication produced by the Toronto-based art trio General Idea. For
Manipulating the Self, the artists first issued a call for photographs
whereby respondents were asked to follow these precise instructions: ‘The
hand is a mirror for the mind - wrap your arm over your head, lodging your elbow
behind and grabbing your chin with your hand.’ The mailer promised that in
this contorted position the sitter would become ‘object and subject,
viewed and voyeur.’ At the next stage, a booklet was produced featuring
115 ‘image situations’ of the prescribed gesture, 99 of which were
identified by the name or initials of the performer. Finally, in 1973, the
mailer and booklet gave rise to a poster, whose publisher suggested changing the
title to Manipulating the Scene - a modification welcomed by General
Idea.
In Situation Comedy, Lafont reconsiders this passage from the
self’s to the scene’s manipulation by performing a series of
displacements. One such displacement hinges on the tension between the
spectacular, the specular and the speculative. Whereas General Idea’s
project played on the mirror relation between hand and mind - turning the
specular act of photographing oneself into a speculative gesture dramatizing the
body/self divide - Situation Comedy brings Manipulating the
Self on the scene, as it were, and into the realm of the spectacular - but
a spectacular in which the self plays merely a supporting role. Out of the 99
colour panels in Lafont’s installation that refer to a named image in
Manipulating the Self, 76 are left blank, as figure-less monochromatic
backdrops bearing the phrase ‘(not performed)’. Thus only 23 panels
show actual figures (enacted by 11 art students) standing in for named
protagonists in General Idea’s booklet. The large stretches of emptiness
in Situation Comedy render the original photographs’ mimetic
function inoperative, by disabling the symmetrical relations between
‘object and subject, viewed and voyeur.’
As if to emphasise the spectacle’s dominance over the individual
performances in Manipulating the Self, Situation Comedy
translates the entire booklet into the strictest expression of visual language:
a colour gradient, from purple to green through red and yellow. Situation
Comedy’s spectacular effect is further achieved by displacing the
formal characteristics of General Idea’s project (black-and-white images,
random mode address through the mail, authorial abstinence, coupling of image
and text) with references to the visual cues of mass-mediated entertainment:
instead of the home-made aesthetic of the self-portraits in Manipulating the
Self, Situation Comedy displays slick surfaces and blemish-less
bodies reminiscent of TV presenters, the garish colour schemes of game shows,
and the controlled environment of a studio.
But, through another displacement, Lafont undermines the
spectacularisation of Manipulating of the Self by focusing on the power
of words - and, particularly, of names - to re-activate the void left by the
absented subjects. Regardless of whether or not a figure appears in the panels
of Situation Comedy, they all include, at the top, the page number
corresponding to General Idea’s publication and, at the bottom, the name
of the student ‘as’ the original performer. The fact that even the
figure-less panels of Situation Comedy bear the names of the two sets
of actors (from 1971 and 2009) performing each other’s gestures signals
the critical role played by the name in Lafont’s installation.
For Lafont, having a name is like wearing, or switching, an item of
clothing: everything depends on the situation and the desired effect. The
performative action in Situation Comedy occurs precisely at the
disjuncture between scenic conventions - whether of television or
‘performance art’ - and those of language. It is when a scene goes
unperformed that the linguistic performance comes to the fore, and that the
actors appear, albeit in name only. The comedy of Situation Comedy
derives from its secondary nature - not a comedic comedy (as in a
‘sitcom’), but a comedy of deferral, of a floating, perpetually
borderline case - in this case, situated in a museum as an installation whose
panels act as props or cards that can be endlessly recombined and reshuffled.
Recombining props, however, is not an invitation to perpetual reverie, or to the
visitor’s subjective projection on the brightly coloured surfaces. Rather
Lafont stages, ‘as’ spectacle, the innumerable roles language can
perform in a given situation, under the guise of proper names.
Suzanne Lafont is renown for her stylized images and theatrical narrative
scenes. She turned to visual art after studying literature and philosophy,
focusing from the start on how images result from a process of cultural
elaboration and construction. Her more recent work develops the fictional aspect
of images, exploring the playful potential of illusion. Since the 1980s, Lafont
has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including
Documenta IX (1992) and X (1997). Among her recent group exhibitions
are elles@centrepompidou at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009),
Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography at Museum
Folkwang, Essen (2009) and Tate Modern, London (2008), Trauerspiel at
Passerelle, Brest (2009), and Reflexio, Imagem contemporãnea na França,
Santander Cultural, Porto Alegre (2009). Lafont's most recent solo exhibition -
Index - took place at Erna Hecey Gallery, Brussels (2008).
Antony Hudek , London January 2011
|
