Somewhere in autumn 2019 I remember seeing Fabrice Schneider's photographs of climbing competitions. They were shown at the INSTITUT DE CARTON as part of the group and accumulative exhibition "Le Petit cercle bruxellois". I remember the images hanging from folding clips, overlapping one another like a saturated computer screen. Their cohabitation had the sculptural aspect of a calendar.A year later I received a publication by the Swiss artist Axelle Stiefel. It again featured images of climbers taken by Fabrice. They appeared at the very end of the book, just after the colophon, and ended on the outside cover. Printed in double-page spreads, as small posters would have been (the book itself is close to A5 format), on slightly glossy paper, they took on the appearance of strange advertisements. The book had to be held horizontally in order to see the image more or less correctly. The more or less is important. The glue that holds the pages together creates a cruel disjunction between the upper and lower bodies. The climbers seem to suffer from physical infirmities: medieval gibbosity, removal of the abdominal region, elephantiasis.
The text :
"Untitled image bank is an open-ended work aimed at constituting and using a stable of images made during international climbing competitions. Each new iteration is an opportunity to review the collection, to propose specific readings and to reflect on the values and meanings that photographic images can contain or produce."
The titles:
Uib_2017_Villars__296.jpg
Uib_2017_Uster__1447.jpg
Uib_2018_Chamonix_160.jpg
Uib_2018_Munich__490.jpg
Uib_2018_Chamonix_594.jpg
Uib_2017_Villars___218.jpg
Uib_2018_Munich__735.jpg
Uib_2017_Chamonix_220.jpg
Finally, in the summer of 2023, I saw Fabrice's climbing beasts for the last time. It was as part of .TIFF at the FOMU in Antwerp. The title of the series had become more precise: "Untitled Image Bank 2016-2023". The images were once again part of a group exhibition in which Fabrice occupied a corner. The photos were stapled directly to the wall, with a discreet PVC sheet to protect them. The images were again printed in a different format, close to A5, while the PVC sheets were A4. They were arranged on either side of the corner. Close to the corner, in line with it, a greyish-brownish cube of Gyproc created a sort of corridor with the walls of the exhibition room. Inside this cube, visitors could immerse themselves in the contemplation of a video of young competitive mountaineers tirelessly warming up. A calendar hung on the plaster wall urged us to be patient.
Since these images are about climbing, and because Fabrice Schneider himself is an elegant climber, I have to reveal a secret. When it comes to mountaineering, Fabrice Schneider's favourite rock formation is the dihedral. In alpine jargon, a dihedral is more commonly known as a corner. Climbing it usually involves a lot of footwork, given the scarcity, if not absence, of handholds. You have to use opposing forces and tension to keep your body in a wide parallel crack. It seems to me that there is something dihedral about Fabrice Schneider's photographic practice.
PATIENCE. TWO CAN PLAY THAT GAME
Before we begin the slow ascent of this allegorical dihedral, let's pause for a moment and mention a blinding fact. Fabrice has been officially rearranging photographs of international climbing competitions for at least seven years. These photos have been shown in three different contexts, although I suspect the secret existence of some other specimen. These readjustments demand endurance on the part of the artist, who continues his work of photographic images reshuffling, but also on the part of the public, who are forced to look at them differently each time they escape from their bank. The "new iteration" announced in the description of the Untitled Image Bank is the opposite of the usual trick of repeating easily identifiable procedures in order to ultimately associate an artist with their brand. In this sense, if Fabrice's practice is indeed photographic, it is not based solely on the production of images. The context of presentation and representation also plays an important role. Viewers are not taken by the hand along the cottony path of memory, but rather forced to rub different aesthetic impressions against each other. However, like the dihedral, the opposite walls can be completely slick and the quality of the grip depends primarily on the pressure exerted by the person dangling in the middle (i.e. you and me). In fact, the majority of photos produced by Fabrice Schneider are anti-climatic in nature, and the most immediately striking element often has a discreet connection with a detail in the image. For example, there is a photograph in the book "Hors-sol" in which an arid hill takes up three-quarters of the frame. Yet it is a graffiti with the acronym ACAB on a stone at the bottom of the image that first catches the eye. Quite literally the tree that hides the forest. The aggressiveness of the inscription takes on a different meaning the more you look at it. At first it makes you smile, given the obvious absence of police in this deserted place, a priori hostile to any form of life (police included). Then the discrepancy becomes more worrying when you consider the enormity of the hill compared to the graffiti. An almost mythical ideal of grandeur in relation to a clandestine practice. Two forms of solitude that evoke antagonistic political positions and a largely unequal balance of power. Then comes the first impression again, that of the laughable nature of this graffiti in the middle of nowhere. But that's where it's most likely to be read, out of its natural habitat. And besides, there are cops and police in the desert too. We just prefer not to think about it too much. Etc.
UNTITLED IMAGE BANK/SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME
The feeding of an image bank is based on an equally uneven balance of power. Paradoxically, it's a lucid naivety. Fabrice's untitled image bank seems very modest compared to giants like Getty Images or generative artificial intelligence programmes like DALL-E. Compared to this kind of wealth appropriation, Fabrice Schneider's practice resembles that of a pilot fish. The definition given by Fishipédia is certainly not very flattering:
"The pilot fish, Naucrates ductor, is an oceanic species known for its dependent relationship with larger animals such as sharks and rays. Over the course of evolution, this fish has developed a diet based on the remains left by its hosts, parasites and excrement."
Let's rather say that Fabrice follows certain mass movements to extract an oblique point of view. If you look closely, this is how each of his image banks has been built up. The one of graffiti, of which the book "Hors-sol" only gives a sample, the one of climbing competitions mentioned above and finally the one borrowed from Jehovah's Witnesses in the book "Questions Young People Ask - Answers That Work, 2 volumes." Each of the activities linked to these photographs seems to link a form of amateurism with a global community. Although each has the potential to generate a profit, the majority of their activities are carried out at a loss. The term professional graffiti artist sounds like a compromise, the full-time climber earns a rather poor living and the frantic proselytising undertaken by Jehovah's Witnesses on a voluntary basis is properly staggering. Business models which, curiously enough, resemble those of the vast majority of artists. These economies are matched by aesthetics that we rarely look at, except to mock. Fabrice Schneider's photos are obviously not devoid of humour, or even mischief, but the patient work and accumulation that characterise them attest to a strange seriousness. Perhaps it's the rather peculiar seriousness that adolescents often show towards political, artistic or religious issues. I have to go back to increasingly distant memories (alas) to experience with considerably less intensity this seriousness about discovery, the pleasure taken in repetition. The figure of the adolescent in Fabrice's photos seems to be on both sides of the camera. Both in the energy that emerges from the photos and in the more factual aspects that can be read into them. This adolescent figure hadn't struck me before. It was only during a joint visit to the exhibition at Sparewheel that Roshan di Puppo mentioned it.
Despite his youthful appearance, Fabrice Schneider technically left adolescence several years ago. We must conclude that this state is not transitory, as every parent hopes, but that it lives in a latent state and makes a few 'spurts' at the times it deems most appropriate. Perhaps this is one of the walls against which the very dihedral Fabrice Schneider leans?
SPAREWHEEL
The preceding lines were intended as an introduction to the report on Fabrice Schneider's exhibition. The exhibition took place in the artist runspace Sparewheel, from February the 16th until the 25th. The excessive length of this introduction forces the report to exist in a separate post.
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Images :
ARTIST NETWORK THEORY No. 1 / No. 2, (2020), Artist Network Theory, Noémie Degen & Simon Jaton, Eva Zornio, Axelle Stiefel, Sanna Helena Berger, Costanza Candeloro, Anna-Liva Marchionni, Alan N. Shapiro, Salome Schmuki, Elisa Storelli, Benjamin Mengistu Navet, Yves Citton, Deborah Müller, Guillaume Maraud, Madeleine Paré, Fabrice Schneider
Hors-sol, (2021), Surfaces Utiles, Fabrice Schneider