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La lumière immobile
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There might be two kinds of light. First, there is the abundant light that bathes the room and reveals the smallest details of each crack, revealing unevenness, wrinkles and accents: the tiniest marks in the most opaque material are bared in the light of this properly photographic deluge. And then there is that other source of light. Less than a source, a zone, a stain, perhaps simply even a fragile weakness in a dark curtain, without its own proper materiality other than the absence of its opposite. This is the light that interests me. It’s the light of the mercury-vapour lamp in the yard of the bar at the corner of de la Couronne and La Salle streets: white and garish, but incapable, with all its strength, of negotiating the darkness which conceals the cars parked there and the couple who take refuge there. It’s the light that pierces the countryside at night and foretells, despite the darkness, a door, a kitchen, a house. It’s the glow of the little night light that converts the everyday objects laying about on the basement floor into mountains, adventures and stories. It’s the light on the kitchen counter that my mother used only rarely: when one of us was sick, when we were waiting for midnight on Christmas Eve, or in other circumstances whose reason escaped me but which I knew to be out of the ordinary simply because of this weak light in the face of the darkness of the night. Of these two kinds of lighting, we practically only ever see the former in the light-box which fills our everyday North American media reality. Apart from the test pattern telling all good people that it is finally time to go to bed, forceful, violent light is served up to us without respite and inundates our domestic spaces. In fact, where many young video makers use images of the eye in their work, we should be seeing a mouth instead. Television doesn’t monitor us: it roars. It shouts in our face like a lieutenant barking orders. It projects its photons towards us like projectiles which strike the brain directly, and the mouth we see on the screen is truly the mouth of an electron cannon hiding in the cathode tube. The first kind of light, projected by the television for instilling the grammar of media, is the light of the luminous ray of science-fiction novels from the turn of the century: a weapon. It’s here that we must focus on the second kind of light. The projects of Éric Gagnon, Bernard Gigounon, John Oswald, Julia Page and Ben Riesman are not content to renounce the artifice of permanent spectacle. They dig into the almost motionless matter of the media flotsam of temperate zones, casting the media themselves in a new light and creating around them zones of shadow: zones of possibilities. At times, this potential is discovered in the very heart of the contemporary media tide. Thus Julia Page uses the most fabricated images in the American televisual universe: the images of the official life of American presidents. But she examines these images obliquely, discovering the hidden character, the secondary character, the president’s daughter, and restores their humanity, which can be painful or touching. Sometimes it is the use of the camera, which everyone carries slung over their shoulder, which opens up the imagination. This is the case in particular in the work of Ben Riesman and Bernard Gigounon who, each in his own way, finds an unsuspected image while using these technologies’ most elementary functions. As if to show that magic still and always will reside in the eye of the beholder. For his part, Éric Gagnon brings video closer to dreams and childhood: close to the time before production. His images are, in fact, drawings, and his characters chimera. The vision he creates is in our head as much as it is in the image box. And it is these two territories which are at issue in the work of John Oswald, in which the crucial element is probably the glass plate separating us from this other world, separating us from it and it from us. Oswald’s work restores us to equilibrium. In this play between each side of the screen, an exchange takes place. Instead of the one-way bombardment of hyper-industrial television, what is offered here are temporal works which do not require synchrony. As Bernard Stiegler remarks, “Consciousness is essentially the consciousness of a self, of something that can say I–I am not the equivalent of any other, I am singular, I give myself my own time.... The culture industries, on the other hand, and television in particular, are an enormous synchronization machine.... When everyday these consciousnesses repeat the same audio-visual consumer behaviour, when they watch the same television programs at the same time, in a perfectly regular manner, because everything is made that way, these ‘consciousnesses’ end up becoming the consciousness of the same person: nobody”.1 In the work on offer here, my time is the time of the work, I can master the passage of time, I can sing the song of the images at my speed. In order to be faithful to the artists’ concepts and projects, we have voluntarily reversed the usual order of exhibition and publication: the publication on DVD of the work exhibited is at the heart of the Still Light project. The primary goal was to record these works in a medium which would enable them to exist in a domestic space, in everyday ways. This publication was then documented by a gallery exhibition. Translation by Timothy Barnard |
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Born in 1970, Éric Gagnon is currently living and working in Québec City where he studied visual arts at Laval University. By proposing installations and performances in which the video image is presented as a moving tableau, Gagnon is looking to renew our perception of images. His work has been shown in video festivals in Québec and across Canada as well as internationally in France, Australia, Mexico, Hungary, Germany and Japan. Born in 1972, Bernard Gigounon lives and works in Brussels. After several years of working in sculpture, he now devotes his time to the world of images, where he experiments and plays with the ambiguities of perception. His work has been presented at Monte Video (Amsterdam), No Gallery (Milan), skif 9 (Saint Petersbourg), Festival Vidéo (Oberhausen), Cinefantom (Moscow), Projection Offpop (Berlin). Gigounon is represented by Galerie Paolo Boselli, distributed by ARGOS in Brussels and MONTE Video (Amsterdam). (credits for the illustrations in the video «Interlude»: Emmanuel Tête). Born in 1953, John Oswald lives and works in Toronto. As an interdisciplinary artist renowned as a composer, musician, performance and media artist, his work has been exhibited at Edward Day Gallery (Toronto), Jack Shainman Gallery (New York), and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. His film “Periphescence” premiered in the Toronto Moving Pictures Festival and he also recently released an album titled “Aparanthesi” on the Montreal-based label empreintes DIGITALes. In 2004, Oswald became a Governor General’s Laureate for his work in the media and sound arts. Born in 1977, Julia Page currently lives and works in California. She works as a lab manager at the Experimental Media Arts Lab at Stanford University and teaches sculpture at University of California (Santa Cruz). She has recently exhibited her work at The Luggage Store (San Francisco), Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery (Los Angeles) and Catherine Clark Gallery (San Francisco). Page has received numerous awards including the Jay DeFeo Prize, Murphy Cadogan Fellowship Award and the San Francisco Bay Guardian GOLDIE Award. Born in 1973, Ben Riesman is a multidisciplinary artist who resides in Oakland, California. After studying in film and comparative literature at Mancalester College, he completed an MFA at Mills College. His often humorous photographs, video and sound work make subtle play with themes of representation and the illusory qualities of perception. His work has been exhibited in several group exhibitions across the USA at the Institute for Contemporary Art (Florida), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), CCA Playspace Gallery (San Francisco), Living Room Video (Portland) and Franklin Artworks (Minneapolis). Jocelyn Robert, born in 1959, shares his time between Quebec City and Montreal. After studying architecture at Laval University in Québec, he completed a master’s degree in visual arts at Stanford University in 2003. Jocelyn Robert is well-known for his work using sound and moving images. His work has been presented across Canada, as well as internationally in the United States, Mexico, Chili, Poland, Germany and France. In 1993, he founded Avatar, an artist-run centre dedicated to sound and electronic art. He is currently teaching at the Université du Québec à Montreal. Dazibao thanks the artists for their generous collaboration
and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the
Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec,
and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement
des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec. |
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