Laurent Dupont, Atelier 2007-2008, le film, (oct 2008) 01 07 06 02, 1h 23 min
Benjamin Installé, Pink panther studio visit, diaporama of 14 photographs, 2012
Perhaps were you at the opening of the group exhibition "D'ailleurs," hosted at the Brasserie Atlas on November the 9th?
The subtitle of the exhibition initiated by Hugo Boutry and Rozafa Elshan was: "an exhibition about attitudes through photography". Laurent Dupont showed a 1h23mns video. The video consists in smoke rings, blown by an off-screen mouth, inside an artist studio. The smoke blower, the cameraman and the artist are presumably the same person. I should perhaps underline the slightly ridiculous term cameraman. Even though the video presents the typical characteristics of a smartphone recording, the year 2008 should remind us of the existence of small digital cameras. Digital cameras and smoke rings certainly situate this video within a temporality that is not exactly the one of instant improvisation. In fact, each take following a smoke ring (simultaneously blown and filmed) presents a similar chronology. The sequence starts in some kind of rush, because of the synchronicity of the filming and the smoking, and ends in a very calm manner with the evaporating of the smoke ring. The difference between those two speeds makes it difficult to associate the cameraman with a wanker calmly practicing his smoking skills on a rundown atelier' sofa. The coolness of the smoke is misleading and the watching of a few minutes of the video is enough to temper the impression of a relaxed atmosphere. Since last week, the memory of a smoke ring landing on a bare wooden shelf and disappearing without my noticing comes back to me every now and then.
It is through that kind of involuntary remembering that the visiting Pink Panther, photographed by Benjamin Installé, crawled back from the past. I can hardly remember the diaporama itself which I saw ten years ago during a jury opening from erg. Yet the main elements are not too difficult to gather: someone is taking a series of pictures (14) inside an artist studio. A small cut out Pink Panther's character is always put in between the camera and what we'd be supposed to see in the atelier. Here too it is logical to assume that the hand holding the Pink Panther is also the one of the photographer and that it might belong to the whole body of the artist in whose studio the pictures are taken.
Of course the appearance of the Pink Panther in an artist studio is humorous, just like the smoke rings almost inevitably trigger a smile, but there's something odd in both cases. Silence, probably. As far as I can remember, the Pink Panther doesn't talk and mainly communicates through gestures. How embarrassing would it be to undergo the studio visit of such a character. Following that thread I could imagine the production of smoke rings as a sabotage of talking. Or at least the deliberate choice to produce an image with one's mouth, instead of a sound.
The missing trace used in the title of this small text might eventually warrant its paradoxical appearance. This absence is the subject of a recurring temptation: to give absence a shape. It is surprising how this shape usually demands great care and a lot of work. A work that is most often painstaking and unspectacular. One could think of Bruce Nauman's Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) which spread over six months and produced hours of video monitoring cats, nothing, mice and nocturnal insects.
Animals, a silent cartoon's character and evaporating rings of smoke share a certain stealth. Something deceptively magic which disappears without leaving a trace, or maybe just a smell and a few droppings. Nothing of the miracle promised by films about " the artist at work". In Nauman's case, the artist is actually sleeping and no one is behind the camera. As this text is about to reach its final destination (that is nowhere), the John Cage reference in Nauman's title becomes more significant and the first words of the Lecture on Nothing come to mind: "I am here , and there is nothing to say ."
Despite the almost authoritative tone this sentence has acquire across the years (alas, one could picture such sentence printed on coffee mugs and sold in museum gift shops), its reoccurrence remains surprising. A similar surprise accompanies the reoccurrence of works on the atelier. There isn't much to show indeed and, in order to show it, one resorts to the indecisive path of a smoke ring, a mouse being chased by domestic cats or the Pink Panther' silent enthusiasm. Art-mediators of a new kind who, at last, leave us alone.