In the hall of Chamarande Castle , the bough of a tree is suspended midair, its branches just brushing the tile floor. As we draw closer, we make out a tiny animal centrally perched upon the limb: an unseeing hybrid creature, escaped, perhaps, from some unknown fantastic world. The work's label informs us that it is a stereolithography, or the materialization of a computer generated image. The disparity between branch and animal, combined with their material differences, leads us to wonder about the nature of the tree-animal relationship and the dimension in which these two particular elements could have met. The branch could be a mere stand or backdrop to the sculpture, but it could just as easily serve to build a sculptural narrative or an unprecedented alliance between nature and virtual reality. The choice remains wide open, neither the object nor the event gaining the upper hand. Stylistically speaking, neither the real nor the imaginary is predominant here, the simple transposing of a foreign element into a historic building no longer considered an artistic gesture in itself, but rather – when able to avoid being a new form of conventionality - a practice of in situ art. The creature's presence on the other hand adds a childlike note to the radical gesture, giving the act – not lacking in arrogance – of creating a world its particular lightheartedness.
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Whether we focus on it or not, however, the mere presence of the animal is enough to warn us against any claim to a Land Art or Arte Povera tradition. The wire from which the branch is suspended, furthermore, betrays an inclination towards illusionism completely at odds with the spirit of the legendary seventies. Thus, in spite of its ostensible metaphorical inconsistency, the branch firmly roots the work in the realm of contemporary art, while the animal outlines a way of escape to either a literary or filmic universe - or merely a somewhere else. Indeed, more than an off-shoot of the contemporary art show, the Château can be seen as a series of fabricated situations or staged works. On the one hand, as if towards a source, there is The Stage, an object-stage (or a stage-object) whose layers of scenery unveil a cosmic show. On the other, the screening of the film The Storm, in a chapel whose stained-glass windows cast shadows on and around the screen. Then, in a narrow hallway on the first floor, the film Leaft, a crime story filmed in the exhibition space itself. Conveying a note of dread - enhanced by the narrowness of the passageway – it perfectly fits the surroundings which seem to be straight out of a novel. Although shot in video, furthermore, the old-fashioned film techniques of Leaft (hand-drawn sets, stop motion animation...) take leave from what had long been thought to be the ultimate phase of the evolution of contemporary art in order to journey back to the media's magical origins. The rabbit pulled out of a hat, the beast crouching on a branch overhead and the assassin and his victim wandering through the castle some twenty centimeters above the floor have more in common than first meets the eye.
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Showing isn't a crime. Yet, to conjure up Fantômas (1) at an exhibition in which slights of hand and travesties of a given reality (mirrors turned into windows, forged paintings, poisonous works) are performed definitely poeticizes Reip's exercise in convention-worn in situ. Likewise, to hang a few meters from the original a mechanical copy of the Vue du château de Chamarande by Hubert Robert (from which most of the figures have disappeared) is the work of a forger, a forgery however that is only fully appreciated upon discovering the artist’s other interventions within the historic setting. Take for example the semi-romantic, semi-burlesque restoration of chipped floor tiles, in which copies of missing tile bits are placed on metallic stems that turn out - as we discover upon reading the work’s label - to be piano cords that add a sonorous note to the scene. Like Auguste Dupin (2) who replaces the purloined letter with another letter, or Arsène Lupin (3) who leaves a calling card at the scene of the crime, the counterfeiting here is licensed and signed, even though it might go unnoticed to the eye of the inattentive visitor. In another room, images of cut-out mushrooms springing out of a 10-18 edition of Nova Express take on the allure of forged pop-ups suggesting a reality altered by a psychotropic substance. As for the toucan beak pedestaled and set down in the middle of one of the sitting rooms, it could only be an image from a dream, an inexplicable presence that even the artist refuses to explain. These examples of appropriations, from discrete manipulations to incongruous manifestations, can be seen as either clues in a vast conspiracy or passages in a narrative of ever-changing tone.
Indeed, what could be the connection between the columns housing a tenebrous show and a theater stage of misbegotten proportions (too large to be a model, too small to be a sculpture)? In the first case, the viewer is transported into a drama; in the second case the viewer is placed at a hypercritical distance. The Stage is apprehended like a box open on three sides, containing a surplus of sets. Images of rocks, stalactites, asteroids and even a pearl are set off against a flaming sky upon which we can make out the image of a hand clutching a star. This planetary show - a portable universe of sorts - clearly follows the tradition of Baroque opera but is equally a descendant of the carryall bag or the props room. The etymology of metaphor being to bear figurative meaning, The Stage - the object bearing the teatro mundi - is thus a metaphor twice over. Placed directly on the floor and not at eye-level, this reduced-scale stage can be seen from multiple angles. Each of the flat images - and the planes determined by these images - can be considered therefore either individually or as a whole, i.e. a show. The piece also suggests the fictive space where the show is being held and the audience for whom it is being performed, the viewer of the piece included. Lastly, The Stage can be understood as an object being shown, emphasizing thus the exhibition's theatrical nature.
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Parallel Worlds, albeit closely related to The Stage, raises a different set of questions. Are, for example, these ultra-flat dried flowers enclosed in a display case connected – beyond metonymy - to the modern pistil-shaped sculptures (The Pistils) revolving in front of a white partition wall whose sole purpose is to capture their shadows? A normally invisible exhibition accessory, the partition, thus isolated in a historical setting, takes on a surprisingly futuristic character - a vestige of the notorious white cube popularized during the 20th century. One of the mirrors in the room, meanwhile, ties in to the Romantic era, while the rotation of the sculptures (main figures in spite of the complexity of the apparatus), which bring to mind the world of Grandville, produces a slightly hypnotic effect that places the work within a broader framework of escape - well beyond the cultural context of the exhibition space that is. Via a game of shadow, illusion and visible change, Reip therefore lessens the solemnity of our encounter with things and objects recognized as artworks, his attraction to parallel worlds and taste for escapism going hand in hand with his voluntary limiting of visual means. Furthermore Reip's works suggest imaginary worlds, whether borrowed or personal, conforming to dated types of representation: a pre-NASA vision of the universe, that is, or an attempt - predating psychedelic art - at expanding the boundaries of perception. It is this use of theatrical illusions and primitive cinematographic techniques that places the “old reality” of the contemporary art show (like the partition mentioned above) in a futuristic perspective. The evolution of Reip's video work, from his rudimentary use of the medium to his reexamining of the origins of cinema (via Méliès), is also significant in this respect. The films presented in the Château therefore resonate on several levels, the show itself taking on the allures of a journey through the multiple worlds of animated film, avant-garde cinema and burlesque art.
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Pinball allows us to make an abrupt transition from the subtleties of the Château - the work of a guest turned occupant – to Reip's film work in general. Like many of the films made during the early days of video, Pinball is based on a simple idea: a rubber ball thrown into a stylish living-room, filmed in static shot. This gesture is comparable to that of the angry kid in Knock. Armed with what we believe is a hatchet, the protagonist of Knock is seen in silhouette hacking away at a door while softly singing a famous Bob Dylan refrain. The door pounding, guitar riff repetition and binary hammering resemble each other, perhaps, but it is only the passion and the intensity of the gesture that allow us to distinguish, at times, repair work from dance music or expressive rage. Leaving the park of the Château behind, Knock also leads us to the question of Reip's film work, in general, with its recurrent theme of evasion. Indeed, the artist over a 15 year period made 26 or 27 videos, varying in length from 9 seconds (Mauve) to a little over 9 minutes (Nerve), testifying to his repeated albeit sporadic use of the medium. The year 1996 marks a turning point in Reip's seemingly nonchalant body of video work, largely comprised of traditional animated films of moving objects, rotating spirals, flickerings and, more recently, a hybridization of images from early cinema and the Internet. Indeed, after an initial 50 second film in 1994, and another 40 second film in 1995, Reip made three films of a total of 12’16” in 1996, one of his most fruitful years in video to date. All three films deal with architecture and destruction. In the first, doors and boards stand up, as if of their own accord. Filmed on the rooftop of a concrete building, this particular construction apes the surrounding architecture. The rooftop terrace as a clean slate or outdoor artist studio, therefore, is merely able to produce a reflection of what already exists while just barely giving us enough time to take it all in. Following this joyful parody of an art of social commitment, Burning Down the House is filmed in static shot in the courtyard of a studio in Tokyo: cardboard boxes into which doors and windows have been cut out are filmed slowly burning. The only thing that takes place here is the burning, which although not quite a tragedy is neither a wholly innocent sight. After having touched on social questions, the pretext of Nerve lies in the cardboard cut-outs left over from Burning. Part documentary, part video performance, this recycling of materials makes up both a short fiction and a documentary of the said recycling. The film sequence, without any editing whatsoever, is much longer that the film which indirectly inspired it. First we see the cut-outs spread out on the ground. Then legs slowly move into the field, bending so that the artist’s hand can pick up the small pieces, one by one, before stacking them in another part of the space. This calmly carried out construction game ends with the pile growing top heavy. The pile comes crashing down, as expected, the suspense of this short and hardly risky video performance – compared with the extreme situations imagined by certain pioneering performance artists – marking the end of a highly constructive year. All three films explore the common question, beyond the theme of architecture, of both the distance separating art and reality and the connection between art and childhood. The themes of each of these films (the violence of architecture and destruction in response to architectural violence; the work of the architect reduced to a construction game pushed to the extreme) explore horizons that are ever beyond reach. Video in this case is not an active means but a passive witness, a narrow window opening onto an artistic space continuously pushed to its limits.
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With All, precursor to X-Man Rodeo, Hugues Reip is true to the technique of stop motion animation, but is even more committed in both his use of video and his confrontation of architecture. The action, of the simplest sort, shows a hole being dug into a white wall, plaster dust spilling out of it to form a small pile in front of the hole. In other words it is a dialog between an empty space and a full space, entities that both question and complete one another. It is a form of process art, shot in the manner of scientific films that show us, within the space of a few short seconds, the growing and the wilting of a flower. As we see neither hand nor digging instrument, the video camera here becomes the subject. This subjectivation of the video camera is taken even farther in X-Man Rodeo. The video this time depicts the camcorder passing through both the spaces and the walls of the Villa Arson, where Reip had been invited to participate in a group show. His response to the invitation, thus, is the visual appropriation of the space in its entirety, an elusive look that takes on a certain freedom – that the artist normally denies the camcorder - as the film is in fact a series of static shots. The events both in All and X-Man Rodeo can be attributed to an invisible performer who digs holes with the help of a spoon or a hammer, two makeshift tools readily associated with escape fiction. The images of X-Man Rodeo are edited with what sounds like the humming of an insect, reinforcing the oppressive climate of the scenes. Like a man with a movie camera, whose body has been forgotten, the subject explored is none other than the will to see. With projection rooms cropping up left and right in art spaces today, Reip invents, via an other-worldly scenario of sorts, a headlong dash within a white cube. His “scenario” is closely related to the show space itself, and it is not hard to imagine an a minima artistic intervention in which tiny holes would be drilled into walls. The use of an exhibition space as both film set and inspiration source foreshadow the video Leaft.
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Reip uses his video camera mainly as a device for recording stills and in doing so he intentionally remains on the cinematographic outskirts, preferring the simple doctoring of images whose special effects are characterized by their clearly visible manipulation. X-Man Rodeo could be a documentary on the gesture of a radical artist, yet its animation opens up an entire field of screenwriting possibilities, from the dream of a demented mind to that of an insect in mutation. By refusing to use zoom shots and other complex camera movements, we are closer to the films of Meliès or the dream machines of Gysin, forms more conducive of reverie, more able to set the viewer’s imagination in motion. The Halo, a video made in 2000, only depicts a white surface of varying luminosity set to joyful music typical of American cartoons. The halo’s source is a VHS film by Fischinger shown on a television screen facing a white wall. This anti-television gesture is probably nothing new, and if not Vostell or Paik, another Fluxus artist most certainly has already made such a piece. But by choosing to celebrate an avant-garde hero in this seemingly impertinent manner, Reip is also inviting the spectator to see a re-creation. In spite of the loss which occurs after various digital transferrals, Fischinger’s film finds itself recycled into a spectral and ultra-radical film, a mere support for imagining or recalling. The Halo is the tentative - doomed to fail from the start yet beautiful in its very failure – to convert a broadcast image into a projected image, even if it means paying the heavy toll of the quasi-disappearance of the model. The most vibrant homage consists therefore in the surpassing of the model, in the retaining of the mere echo or the palpitation of the screen. The Halo constitutes an extreme case, an example of anti-cinema, yet is also emblematic of both the position of the artist and the role that exercises in admiration play in his work. Turning the television set and respectfully re-appropriating Fischinger brings Reip into the arena of Wolman or Debord.
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Reip, since The Halo, seems to be turning to a rediscovery of avant-garde animated cinema. But the video transposition of works by Fischinger or McLaren also helps him determine the contours of his own artistic universe. Thanks to a commission by the Cinémathèque Française, he looks once again to Meliès. Dots, The Storm and Fantasy superimpose animated views of drawings and filmed images, attempting to commingle, in a Baroque universe or sorts, both underwater and celestial worlds. The long graphic variation of Dots merges a graphic universe marked by Op Art with a world of atomic consciousness, depicting, via a succession of explosions, the creation of a world out of signs of destruction. This first work with found footage leads to a poetic universe culminating in Fantasy. In Fantasy, film comprised of figures and sideway-sliding sets borrowed from Méliès, the French film magician himself surfs onto the screen. Pilfering the Méliès treasure trove in order to better admire him, Reip also borrows images found online to update his hero. The lateral motion of flat figures, their entrances and exits from one side of the frame or the other, belong in effect to the realm of theater, which brings us again to The Stage. There is more than one complementarity or one sense of continuity between the films and the Château. Indeed, the exhibition at times feels like a stage or a film set, at others like a backstage or an exclusive salon. The castle here is the framework of both an art exhibition and a fiction. Yet it is also the exhibition of a show within a fictional framework, the spaces and eras fitting together and unfolding. A guest turned into an occupant, Hugues Reip welcomes us with an air of being elsewhere - in one or several of the parallel worlds that he has allowed us to catch sight of.
P.J.
(1) Fantômas, popular character of French crime fiction created in 1911 by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain.
(2) C. Auguste Dupin, fictional detective created in 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe. Reference here, The Purloined Letter (1844).
(3) Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief of French crime fiction ,created in 1905 by Maurice Leblanc.
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