It might be said that the origins of Olivier Bardin’s work coincided, a little more than 10 years ago – in 1991 – with his admission to the School of Fine Art in Bordeaux. What in turn explains Olivier Bardin’s immediate inspiration, as soon as he started attending the School, is the striking unusualness of the relational model based on which his way of operating is organized. Otherwise put, it was the instant awareness of the role-playing that develops therein between the different people at the School. To borrow Olivier Bardin’s own words, “in good schools you don’t see anything, everything is structured by way of words, even if, a priori, words are not an end in themselves. What matters is what is constructed in this back-and-forth to-ing and fro-ing between a word that is addressed to us and which, as a student, you can or must in turn return”. There is a special power in words – as there is, reciprocally, in silence ? which organizes the relational complexity which is developed in this particular place. So the School of Fine Art appeared to Olivier Bardin to be an excellent laboratory of human relations, where hierarchic relationships, mainly constructed on the authority of aesthetic judgements, are eminently alterable.
Horizontality, the juxtaposition of viewpoints, is, furthermore, one of the most significant recurrent gestures in Olivier Bardin’s propositions. More radically than the mere plurality of viewpoints, the equality of viewpoints – a kind of democratic indifference – corresponds to one of the certainties expressed by his work. It is from this that the artist’s twofold preoccupation would unfold, almost turn by turn : at times this would involve inventing methods for organizing and channelling this diversity (what would subsequently come to be known as formats) ; at others it would involve staging or presenting the conditions for constructing individual autonomy within a context entailing an egalitarian comparison of viewpoints (which would subsequently come to be known as devices). The ubiquity of what recurs in the evolution of Olivier’s approach and method under the name of set – the immanent foundation of most of these devices, right down to their “neutral” and desert-like aspect – may likewise be regarded as a representation of this equality, like an abstract image of this democratic agora that is always implicitly conjured up.
Olivier Bardin’s main creed has always involved cultivating his capacity for autonomy, and “inventing his own means of survival”, as he himself puts it. A borderline attitude which has irked more than a few and intrigued one or two others, including the School’s most dynamic director, Guadalupe Echeverria – which probably represents a merely apparent paradox. So there has not really been any actual break between the period of apprenticeship and the period of solo research, which is ordinarily synonymous with artistic work. Or rather, if there has been any such break, it has occurred differently to what the term usually implies. Once through school, the crucial issue for Olivier was to manage to find an equally favourable setting in which to take his line of thinking a step or two further.
Images which don’t exist
Olivier Bardin’s principal discovery to do with the role-playing involved by the particular forms of verbal traffic in the School and their fluctuating effects of authority would give rise to a series of experiments which would all share in common the fact of producing image effects – and in particular self-imagery – without it being obligatorily necessary to proceed by way of a material production of images. For example, by having himself elected as student representative, and then, thanks to the favours accorded by the real director, becoming the School’s virtual director, the apprentice artist was trying more to intervene in the social game typical of the School by trying to cause, within its usual operation, a whole series of micro-upheavals, than to exercise any particular kind of actual function. Acts such as the organization of student exhibitions in the building opposite, based on somewhat disconcerting rules of play – disconcerting when compared with the usual expectations of a full-circle artistic proposal -, or alternatively the fact of giving lectures in lecture halls about the concrete conditions of enunciation inherent in such an exercise, would attempt to blur a little bit more the differences set forth between those being taught and their teachers ; and they would also help to bolster that slightly blurred image of a person and an activity, whose meaning was difficult to pin down with any precision.
Here an ambitious definition of the word image emerges, a definition which does not have a lot to do with the framing of a series of lines and colours brought together on one and the same plane of vision. The image here is invariably process rather than outcome. As is shown by the series of exhibitions at the School’s Gallery, the image formed by each exhibition is above all a pretext for maintaining a relationship. Every evening a student artist was invited to come and shut him or herself in with the artist student in the school’s gallery in order to alter what had been done in the same place the night before, the rule of play being that only the material things present in the space (the elements of sets which the artist reckoned he was part of) could be used, without any external input. What was produced during the night was subsequently shown in public the following morning through the closed window. And so on and so forth, thus creating two exhibition programmes, in two quite different series. And because what happens during the night between the two people seems much more interesting to him than the exhibition that can be seen the following morning, it is logical that the following proposition will try to make the previous production more radical, by imagining the means of retransmitting live and in its entirety the equivalent of this “work that was produced during the night, rather than being pushed to produce and show something next day”. Henceforth, the definition of the image as proposed by Olivier Bardin involves not only the idea of a period of time but also a sort of on-going construction site which is being forever reactivated. This is the origin of TV for TV, the first television device devised by Olivier, when he accepted an invitation from Pierre Huyghe to take part in Mobile TV, a local television programme made at the Consortium in Dijon, in October 1997 1. In addition to the repeated occupation of a 30-minute space / time slot based on live – one-to-one – confrontation between the artist-presenter and his guests, the Dijon broadcasts thus constantly show the control room that produces them, and the operations which, “behind the scenes” and in the wings, make the physical recording of the images possible.
We might say that, from the outset, the strategies developed by the artist have been based precisely on the refusal of the ready-made image in favour of an investigation – starting from different forms of socialized exchanges – about what creates the conditions of any representation, this side of the image. If it seems very easy to him to make an image – and it is a fact that most of Olivier Bardin’s devices turn out to be amazingly photogenic, even though the images he derives from them do not, up until now at any rate, have a status other than that of souvenir photos -, it appears on the contrary much harder to envisage the construction of a situation capable of including a community of individuals, and likely to have repercussions on all the representations produced by those taking part, both of other people and of themselves. Everything happens as if Olivier Bardin were trying to question the effects of image transmission, rather than the “reality” of the image ; not that particular something that the image represents and which it is supposed to transmit, but that process of self-apprenticeship and self-assertion which is constructed in the circulation of images implicit in any relationship.
These days it has become a commonplace to wonder about the possible nature of images of a company, a product, or any kind of person ? especially if that figure has a specific public role (such as a politician, of either gender). For us, the image we present of ourselves opens or closes the field of possible relations that may be had with others. Where this image turns out to be poorly balanced ? over- or under-exposed ?, it may then be said, for example, that it is necessary to recentre it in order to make it once more compatible with the representations of what is considered, at any given moment, to constitute a new average, or a tendential average of opinions. In any event, others, like ourselves, are only taken into account on the basis of a certain image that we form of ourselves and others. Further still, the one-to-one dialectic implicit in most of Olivier Bardin’s devices is founded on the idea whereby the image that we form of others reveals ourselves. It exposes us. In other words, the type of imagery which interests Olivier implies that the other, in the relationship, functions like a mirror in which the image of the subject is reflected. So the real image at issue in Olivier Bardin’s work is, in differing ways, invariably a non-literal image. It is possible to identify two possible strategies : either what is imagery does not designate what it represents first and foremost, as a material image, but an image of the ego that has produced it or which is looking at it ? for example, the photographs requested by Olivier from artists and friends, known or unknown, brought together in the Albums series, function just as well as kinds of substitutes capable of providing affective and mental information about the donors as through the great variety of specific assemblages to which they may give rise, like a “narrative” representation of the collectors themselves 2 ; or the second strategy, which no longer involves the relationship with a concrete image. Based on a form of sociological determinism which seems to be regarded as an established fact, it is, for example, the social function fulfilled by the subject that will be the medium of the image of it formed by the others, and as from which, in return, a process of representation of themselves will be embarked upon. Whence a certain fascination for people who represent something : an authority, a public figure (a director, a movie star, a TV presenter or host, etc). In this case, the reality of the image may take on the form of a narrative, secret or otherwise, telling the story of a projection. This is the principle behind the rumour which gives rise, in spite of everything, to real effects in the form of psychological representations, and fantasies, which alter relations. The English conceptual artist Victor Burgin has thus emphasized the input of psychoanalysis which “teaches us that the image we form of ourselves and the images we form of others are always, up to a certain point, fictional. The word « fiction », as used here, suggests notions like those of « narrative » and « presentation » or « stage direction », a vocabulary of representation which is thoroughly appropriate for describing the field of human action” 3.
Likewise, in many of the attempts made by the New Novel or Nouveau Roman, we find this typical idea whereby “you can get everything to exist through strength of mind and imagination”, to use the words of the director Claude Régy discussing the new, not to say novel, nature of Duras’ writings. Actually, this is one of the most important established facts about what we call modern art, since the famous experience of the exchanges of letters – correspondances – made by Charles Baudelaire at the World Fair held in Paris in 1855, or the impressionist theory of poetic language defined by Mallarmé as a requirement to “paint not the thing but the effect it produces”, to consider that an image no longer necessarily exists as a mimetic representation rendered material on a tangible surface or medium, but for example – to stay with Mallarmé – as “the transposition of a fact of nature in its virtual vibratory disappearance” (Crise de vers, 1892-95). Since then, a genealogy has emerged where making imagery proceeds by way of an avoidance of the image, of the effects of the image, enlarged images, but in a non-literal way, conveyed by procedures such as analogy or metaphor. The archaeology of the movement image as retraced, for example, by the very beautiful film made by the German film-maker Werner Nekes “Was geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern ?” (“What really happened between the images ?”) (1986), confirms the extent to which the 19th century was intrigued by phenomena of paradoxical perception, and imagination of the image, such as the phenomenon described as retinal persistence: an image which literally does not exist, but which you nevertheless see as if it were projected before our very eyes. In a way, it is this story which is prolonged by the so-called conceptual and post-conceptual art of the late 1960s : either that the image is then transported into the “mind” of the person who, without really seeing it, mentally formulates the possibility of it based on the plan or reading of the words which initiate or name it ; or that, be it photograph or drawing, it does indeed exist in a material sense, but has no function other than enabling the elaboration of another type of image, which proceeds by way of the weaving of a text in which it is just one of the component parts. So, if the construction of the image these days proceeds in particular by way of its “conceptual” dematerialization, it might be said, conversely, that the insistence on the image is tantamount, in many respects, to a nostalgic reaction of a whole swathe of art that is called visual, always in the process of losing its difference a little bit more – that difference which it reckoned to be most specific to it. For the image is basically imago mundi or paysmage – image of the world: a homogeneous representation of an inhabited world. In this sense, it is not certain that today’s world creates imagery. Since Brecht, people have denounced the illusion that an image alone might suffice unto itself. We know that image-rich information is nothing without its caption. The whole tradition of the counter-image since Heartfield, of the counter-propaganda image, has moreover enhanced the editing process: always an image + 1. The cinema of the real, which, in the past few years, has been undergoing a revival of inventiveness – I am thinking, for example, of the film testament of Johan van der Keuken, Derniers mots / Last Words – is finally showing us that we do not perhaps need a right image, if that is possible, as much as we need a verbal rightness.
A potential space
As is demonstrated in an exemplary way by the overhead and motionless filming, from sunrise to sunset, of the dismantling of the elliptical inflatable structure which each year covers the amphitheatre-cum-bullring in Nîmes during the winter months – one of the artist’s very earliest propositions – everything starts in Olivier Bardin’s case with the strict delimitation of a unity of time and place. Like an unreal planet on which people seem to move about in slow motion, everything starts with a radical spacing, the quest for a cleared area with the value of an absolute foundation : a space that is extended and stretched in time ; a period of time that is spatialized. The primary representation of a central void where, to use the famous line by Mallarmé, “Nothing else will ever have taken place except the place”. So this other proposition consisting in the waxing of a two by two metre square of parquet, drawing on the actual floor the symbolic representation of a table (a recurrent object in Olivier Bardin’s projects 4, emblem of egalitarian exchange and negotiation between partners. Until not so very long ago, in quite a lot of Olivier’s projects, this setting, independently of any content, theme or issue, was the ideal object of the work. In a way, this insistence on the decisive importance of the setting in the birth of an image is an acknowledgement that prolongs the characteristic investigations conducted by artists of the 1970s into the influence of contexts in the perception of the work of art. For Olivier Bardin, the School was an initial “Loft Story”, well ahead of the airing of the famous reality TV programme 5. It was an initial place where, as he so rightly observes, the various exchanges pointed to the fact of the very circumscribed context in which they came about.
“The words that circulate in it only have any meaning because the space is closed, otherwise they would be depleted”. His attendance at the School of Fine Art in Bordeaux was decisive for becoming aware that it was enough to work over a shorter time-frame, in a smaller place, with a small number of people – as was made possible, for example, by the Le Triangle gallery on the other side of the street – in order to intensify relations, and heighten them. The three days spent closeted with Delphine Zampetti in a Bordeaux apartment, without any connection with the outside world, was another premonitory version of the famous above-mentioned reality TV programme. The originality of that extended flirt nevertheless stems from the fact that there was no live witness, so it could only be imagined, projected – fantasized – by one or two of the two accomplices’s close friends. Enclosure and confinement are paramount data. The vocabulary of Foucault ? power, confinement, control – recurs systematically in the descriptions offered by the artist for his work. As if there could be no question of social relations that are not straightaway permeated by domination strategies. Confinement is not only a vital condition for role-playing – the face-to-face encounters stage-directed by Olivier Bardin – to take on a certain intensity, but it is also the condition that really triggers the process of image production in the form of projections, imaginations, rumours, and peddled stories. Confinement has, as a corollary, a break or cut, a closure, an exclusion that is enough to activate the dynamics of the proposition by introducing a relation of asymmetry. In another way, the window of Même si c’est la nuit (Even if it’s the night) expresses division and closure in the form of a relation that is a priori confiscated. This is the principle of commodity: stimulate desire through an exhibition, while making the spectacle inaccessible to appropriation. There are many other examples, too. In TV for TV, or alternatively in the device of Les Locataires (The Lodgers), where the TV viewers’ room is cut off from what happens in front of the cameras, everything is enacted based on the tension created by the disjunctive relationship between what is inside and what is outside. It is a matter of acting on this division, or trying to negotiate and surmount it (which neatly defines the project of any hands-on television) by being acted upon by it. In other devices, some people are deliberately excluded because there is not enough room, or because they can’t quite hear the snippets of conversation which are linked together in the internal linkage of the microphones connected to each other on the set. It is in particular in an intentional way that, in an exhibition supposed to broach new forms of militancy, “one watches part of the audience taking the floor and talking, and thus excluding the rest of the audience”. Sometimes it is a simple blindfold knotted over the listener’s eyes that calls this closure to mind. Sometimes it is just the colour – the red neon of Even if it’s the night, the video blue of Bleu (Blue) – which works like the embodiment of this infra-thin – infra-mince – boundary between two worlds. But in each instance the separation organizes a tension by creating a relationship of confrontation: between the presenter or host and the interlocutors, between the interlocutors themselves, or between the interlocutors taking part in the devices and those who are excluded from them, and relegated to the sidelines.
It is as from Olivier’s participation in Pierre Huyghe’s local television project that the set has become the favourite territory for staging most of his propositions. We might define the set as the concrete medium or surface on which are brought together all the material and human elements present at the moment when the programme is made. It is more than a décor : it synthesizes the exhibition form by condensing its basic components : a place with clearly defined boundaries ; one or more characters ; and an audience. Whatever its delimitation may be – a coloured neon and the thickness of a pane of glass, the technical device of a television set ? the set is above all a stage for exhibiting or displaying the person. It represents a unity of place which implies that the “spectacle” unfolding on it only has any meaning in so much as it is offered to an audience ? in accordance with the various forms which may extend to the paradox of “seeing nothing”. In comparison with the usual forms of the exhibition, the set (theatre, television) thus highlights the mediatory dimension of what is being presented. It involves a greater consciousness that the production of an image cannot be dissociated from the economics of its circulation. But this spatial frame that redefines the form of the exhibition also involves and implies minimal rules of play. The set thus redefines the exhibition as a format, whose specific features are essentially temporal : whence the standard length of 30 minutes crops up in many of Olivier’s propositions. Needless to say, this shift of vocabulary, of the exhibition on the set, cannot be separated from an age in which television has become the common referent of many of our representations.
Some types of formats, like for example the Albums series of 10 x 15 photos, or the slide show of J’aurais fait autrement (I’d have done otherwise), simply propose methods for synthetically organizing a large number of photographs or artistic proposals by bringing them together on one and the same surface. Conversely, the rules of play likely to get a set functioning, because they have to do not with already materialized images but with image-producing characters, using “immaterial” projections as an intermediary, involve the invention of a type of code and thus of a type of “language” that is much more sophisticated. So a set cannot be conceived without a device of interaction. These devices, which form the main and, without any doubt, the most original part of Olivier Bardin’s work, lend an immediately concrete turn of phrase to the formula produced by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whereby “language is a medium”. If being a user of the language means, as Agamben proposes, “being in a method”, Olivier Bardin’s devices accentuate the metaphor by showing the extent to which the language of words cannot be separated from the relation to a body, itself caught in a situation. The postulate of Olivier Bardin’s interactive devices thus implies that the concrete situations of interlocution in which the bodies are caught are crucially important for the choice and sense of the words which might be used. Here we find a kinship with the theses of a so-called pragmatic trend in contemporary linguistics : ethno-methodology. This contextualist approach to social relations reckons that it is interactive situations which are primarily significant.
It is not just the word that structures the conditions of interaction, but also a whole series of image-producing or -inducing signs. To get back to the philosopher’s observation, it likewise suggests that, in two different ways, this materialization and this broadening of what I shall call “language” in the interactive devices proposed by Olivier, transform the user into a passenger. This means, on the one hand, that the individual who “reveals” himself in the interaction is invariably a being in transit, a momentary being who sets himself down, or takes a rest for a split second before dis-appearing or appearing otherwise in another form. But being in a method also means, in the literal sense of the word, the fact of being caught in a movement and thus of being led somewhere, by the very rules of the code used, without the person being borne away being, in some sense, transported for no purpose.
For some time now, the rules of play of Olivier Bardin’s devices no longer seem to be satisfied with the simple elements present on the set. This is so with the series produced last year, based on the dialogic text written by Marguerite Duras titled Le Camion (The Lorry). The cut between words and images, or more precisely the radical disjunction between the status of the words used by the protagonists – words which, though simple, are a priori completely alien to them, as can be noted by the unfeigned difficulty most of them have in reading their lines out loud – and what the others may see of their mimes, illustrate, in an exemplary way, the conclusions which may be drawn from Agamben’s observation. The Lorry is actually, in every possible way, as engine and as the literary text of a recognized writer, a literal translation of the use of language as a medium / means of transport or conveyance, like “being in a method”. Through diction, first and foremost, each “character” seems to “slip into” the text, and materially take possession of their medium. Then the text appears like the viaticum or provisions of an actual relationship, usually male / female, unhooked from the text but for which the text acts as a pretext, sometimes with thoroughly fortuitous coincidences between the level of what is said and the level of what is enacted between the two protagonists. The faces, in particular, turn into an image to be read, a “reading surface”, an idea that already cropped up in the way Duras’ plays were staged and directed6. Otherwise put, the text appears like a simple method of approach, intensification and densification, of a relationship between two protagonists which that vital third party, the onlooker, is once again invited to observe, before perhaps becoming in his / her turn one of the actors. The rule of play in Olivier’s proposition is actually akin to karaoke and implies that everyone can in turn enter the fray based on the “performance” proposed by the previous actors (the text lends itself to this in particular, since, in talking about the end of the story, it is in a way endless). The interest of this series lies in the clear dissociation of the two levels of the text : the “textual” text, if we can so put it, by Duras ; and the text in which all the signs other than those of language, in the strict sense of the term – flow and intonation of the diction, body postures, mimes, etc. , are the vector.
A device is thus the construction of a situation that obliges the person, male or female, who submits to it, to act, to take decisions which, in each instance, will produce in the interlocutors, as in the speaker or locutor himself, representations ; and at the same time a kind of trap where those taking part find themselves being led somewhere without knowing very well where or how. The set also works under the scalpel of the camera as the place of the slow-motion projection of our social being. Everything comes about as if it were a matter, through the means of language, but beyond natural language, of materializing “the plan of consistency” specific to each individual ; the way specific to everyone of taking place.
What is involved ?
The basic rule of each device consists, for a participating interlocutor, in inventing and assessing what Olivier somewhere calls “the forms of politeness” likely to construct a relationship between a “presenter” or “host” (often “performed” by the artist himself) and usually other interlocutors, via the technical go-between of a set, fitted, as required, with microphones, cameras, audio headphones and in some cases television sets and a mixing table. “The task of each candidate is to invent not only a link with the people present on the set, but, through them, with an audience which he does not see and with which the relationship can only be established in one direction”. No justification, either playful or thematic, attempts to veil the sense of discomfort which is very quickly released by this absence of explanation. Olivier is not interested in spectacular effects but in the average effectiveness of roles and functions. His devices are thus contemporary with the unprecedented increase in live strategies favoured by the new media (talk shows, the Internet, etc.), which turn the discussion, as an undefined process for creating an average of opinions, into the real paradigm of the contemporary public sphere. The difference here, however, is that every “session” is structured around a void, an absence of theme in which the subject is absorbed in order to be delivered unto himself, which never fails to create an oppressive situation. “I’m not trying to state, to transform something”, Olivier says. Everything happens as if it were a question of creating the material conditions of a transmission while at the same time merely underlining the difficulty, the impossibility, not to say the futility of expressing whatever it may be, as the impressive accumulation of notes that has accompanied Olivier’s work since he attended art school is forever and repeatedly describing. Whereas even in France, in particular, the 1990s were synonymous for a large chunk of the artist’s generation with re-encounters with a certain political radicalness, we can only note in Olivier’s propositions a total absence of idealism and political passion, and a fundamental indifference to all forms of commitment. The obvious fascination with the gestures, twitches and procedures typical of conceptual art – ”spareness”, insistence on interactive systems, neutral categorizations, series – and the period of Dan Graham’s performance videos is thus concertina’d with the somewhat dandyish attitude of that perpetual onlooker by the name of Andy Warhol, who always preferred to be an amplifier of social reality than the improbable actor in a forthcoming revolution. Economy of means, not to say the expressive poverty that hallmarks Olivier Bardin’s devices, combined with the artist’s impatience which swiftly changes the social configurations of his presentations, without the previous ones really having given rise to any sort of conclusion, hardly favour the readability of his goals, what is more.
An expectation is introduced, which calls to mind the atmosphere of a certain modern theatre. As in the theatre of the New Novel, “relieved of the concern over telling a story, [...] it is no longer a matter of explaining with words, but quite simply of talking, and just of talking” 7. So the conversation is embarked upon as if it were a question of informing the expectation : “One talks in order to forget that nothing is happening, [...] one talks so as not to be borne away by the dizziness of nothingness” 8. Each participant is thus obliged to cope with an almost absurd situation by trying to prove to those listening to him his capacities for “managing the situation”, by taking bold decisions even when nothing in particular is being asked of him. A bit like those training tests undertaken by certain offices of human resources in large firms, he must show that he is capable of making do, capable of levity, even when the device in which he finds himself creates especially stifling constraints. This process may, furthermore, be psychologically rather cruel, as can be seen, for example, in Side man, a series of “interviews” between art school teachers and some of their students.
It is obvious that it should be possible to question, in psychoanalytical terms – and perhaps even in the terms of a social history of art – what such a desire for effacement covers up, a desire to relieve the participants of their social roles, be they learned or inherited, that wish, over and above any kind of voluntarism, to deconstruct in each individual the certainties which structure the representations they make of themselves. What is the loss in the family history of the artist that is likely to justify such a deep-seated doubt ? If it is certain that, in every artistic proposition, something like a mirror of the producer subject is outlined, it is nevertheless in no way necessary to link back up with the now obsolete customs of biographical investigation to note that one of today’s most common experiences resides precisely in the radical loss of confidence in the symbolic surplus value that was supposed to offer such and such a role, function, and position, all externalized by visible signs, on the social chequerboard. This abyss of the void that tension creates through the eyes of others makes you dizzy, and works like a maximum restriction which is not unrelated to artistic activity. Should the artist not be capable, no matter the situation offered to him, of taking decisions in order to bring a proposal into being – But this new version of the famous maxim that claims that “all men (all women) are artists”, rings out here in an odd way. Is there not actually an element of cruelty in the fact of asking the individual, point-blank, to prove his capacity for autonomy under the pitiless control of others – Should we envy the position of the artist who has become the emblem of the fate earmarked for individuals in the free-market society – Olivier Bardin’s devices thus appear like kinds of traps where the challenge invariably consists – starting from the void in which each participant finds him / herself plunged and thanks to his / her exposure to others – in creating the conditions of a reflexive relation capable of referring everyone to themselves ; as if it were a question of revealing that the critical limit of every exhibition were the exposure of the onlooker. This recurrent scene of self-visualization or autoscopy, where the subject is faced with himself, may be regarded as the pivotal point of Olivier’s devices. This is why this type of confrontation, where a kind of “master of ceremonies” seems to have the role of bringing to the surface the real inner life of a protagonist “relieved of the alluvia of appearance and social hypocrisy”, also suggests a possible parallel with the method of the psychodrama 9. But this would be failing to be sufficiently attentive to the close and dialectic articulation between the individual and collective dimensions of the self-reflection embarked upon. As I have already mentioned, an analogy with the principles of the “Reality Shows” which appeared in France in the late 1980s seems to me to be more forward-looking, in the final analysis. Miguel Hernanda, the set designer for Loft Story and creator of many décors for television programmes aimed at the general public, described the rules of play for this programme as follows: “All the living areas [...] are closely examined so that, apart from the confessional, people cannot really become aloof. This is also the reason why there are very few props which might divert those taking part from the attention they ought to be paying to each other. Everything is done to make them be concerned with each other, discover one another and react to this behind-closed-doors” situation 10. Without any stage direction, without any script, and almost without any plot beyond what is permitted by this very limited environment, the programme is directly inspired by “the webcam system” which, in 1995, enjoyed a moment of international acclaim because of the success of the www.jennicam.org website, where a young woman offered (and is still offering, in exchange for a small financial contribution) net-surfers all over the world the simple spectacle of her own life in her own home by way of a camera set up in her bedroom. Everyone is agreed about the fact that the identification of viewers with the spectacle ? ”I watch this programme because that woman’s problems are just like my own” – explains this new craze. As a Loft Story standard-bearer puts it : “The programme invites society to watch, and what is read in the mirror is not very flattering” 11. But in the end of the day it does not much matter what kind of verdict you may – or should – make on it. What is important here is to recognize the extent to which it is symptomatic of a transformation of the methods adopted for constructing identity in contemporary societies. As a sociologist recently put it, when he uttered his impressions of the programme : “The identity that was traditionally granted by society must henceforth be personally constructed [...]. The individual now extends his surface by externalizations, in particular in the form of images of himself, whereas at the same time he seeks answers to the questions he asks, as he observes his contemporaries down to the tiniest detail [...]. The private place of intimacy is in the process of changing, and is now subject to the externalization of self which is becoming the predominant feature of contemporary societies 12”.
As in this emblematic programme, where the handful of participants selected seems to be a carbon copy of any casting session for sitcom actors, the “nothing” or void created by the absence of any theme is an essential condition for the construction of a mirror effect. More than a mere process of identification, however, Olivier Bardin’s subject-free devices, together with what they involve by way of constraints and the symbolic involvement of the interlocutors taking part as onlookers, reveal the subjective consequences of the process of mediation peculiar to all social construction. So I have a feeling that it is possible to say that, by stripping bare the power of the representations that everyone makes about the way others look at things, they take part in the configuration of a critical space of public communication. This critical positioning never appears like an evidently obvious content which might be identified as the “content” of such and such a project. It does nevertheless have a tendency to specify itself through the repetition and variation of the devices through one another. The insistence with which the figure of the child crops up again and again in the final episodes of the development of Olivier’s propositions is a good example of this. The child, just like the narrator in the classic novel, actually appears more and more like a kind of delegate or representative of the artist himself. Now, even if there is never any question either of specifically denouncing such and such a wrongdoing on the part of symbolic power or of specifically shedding light on the psychological control mechanisms wielded by such and such a type of discourse, this figure nevertheless makes it possible to give some perspective to an ideal, a-significant (neutral, in the etymological sense) position of non-power, alien to the violence of social relations.
Grown-ups and not so grown-ups
For the first time in the development of his work, Olivier’s latest proposition, produced with the professional wherewithal of a television set and visible in the exhibition sponsored by Ami Barak for the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Contemporary Art Fund [Frac], has been conceived in an instant way to create an image. The recorded talk show, which presents differing versions of a face-to-face encounter between a grown-up and a child, has actually been produced to be shown in a pre-recorded version based on the re-editing of a selection of fragments from several recordings made the same day. In an even more exaggerated way than in other propositions, the encounter staged is drawn against a stunning void ? a backdrop white which gives the feeling of a total absence of floor and background, as if the characters were floating in a virtual, purely mental space, which in turn undoubtedly reinforces their character as pure figures. Contrary to what one might think, what is involved here is not a television programme about an important topical subject, or, even less, a film or a specific story that would have to be followed and understood. In this case it would be necessary to pay more heed to what is being said than to what these words alter in the child’s behaviour. My hypothesis is that it is rather a matter of the staging of two symbolic figures who function as the representation of the most extreme polarities peculiar to any subjective construction, and in so doing reveal the two ideal polarities of the artist’s work. The pretext which is the theme of the discussion – the events of 11 September – that is a priori familiar to each one of the interlocutors, on account of the ravages of the news, regardless of its secondary character, thus once more becomes meaningful, in so far as it comes across as an exaggeratedly magnified example of what is produced by relationships of domination between people.
On the one hand it is possible to identify through the character of Mr. Bruno Racine, current director of the Villa Medicis in Rome, but more importantly chairman of the Foundation for Strategic Research – one of the temples of analysis dealing with the major manoeuvrings of the world’s powers-that-be in the dovetailing of their different effects on a world scale -, a kind of emblem or figure of authority. On the other hand, the child with whom he is, for his part, confronted, embodies, if not a figure of “innocence”, then, in any event, a figure of the absence of authority – a generic child who exceeds any specific identification and represents a common state peculiar to childhood as such. The “weapons” of this dialogue as they are shown to us through the re-editing are nevertheless unequal : the grown-up may not have any imagery, but he controls the sound, while the ubiquitous image of the child is wordless. As in The Lorry, the relation between image and sound is thus markedly disjunctive.
While the voice always comes from the same source, the faces, more than ever ? and here without children’s words ? appear like so many expressive reading areas. What is important in this face-to-face encounter is the relationship of asymmetry between the two figures : one is supposed to be a sort of model of knowledge and mastery, while the other is regarded as the degree zero of a process of training which is still only at the stage of the simple solidification or crystallization of a self-assertion, and whose relationship to the grown-up is precisely one of paramount ordeals. What example are you giving me for what I should become – the child seems to be asking the grown-up who, in advance, guesses what the question will be and attempts ? desperately, and by deconstructing himself little by little, as his responsibility seems to sidestep the issue – to answer it satisfactorily. The child invents himself in this mirror relationship just as much as he alienates himself from all the other possibilities of being himself, which, in this exchange, will never be presented to him.
The adult, for his part, is lost, regresses, and implicitly challenges all the assurances that had made him, one day or another, think about forming a more or less established “ego” or “me”. And we, onlookers, we are invited to take cognizance of this movement of connecting vessels ? akin to an upturned hourglass ? whereby one empties while the other fills. We are looking at a scales or a swing, at the exact spot where the assurance of the one tips over into the assurance of the other, and where, in a reciprocal way, the absence of being a child becomes, as it fills, the factor of a flight which grows into the assured shell of the adult. A scene is thus sketched out at the crossroads of analytical session and media-related catharsis. A scene, therefore, in which are externalized – just as on a theatre set – representatives, promoted to the rank of general equivalent, of two of the most private polarities of any subjective configuration. Desire for authority, figure of regression. Even if, or in spite of the fact that, in the final analysis, as Olivier would put it, all this is pretty “grey”, average, not very uplifting, and, in any event, not likely to give to the inner monologue specific to each person a particular aura, everyone can, mirror-like, find here the rudimentary ingredients of his own psychic apparatus. Like the little bells which can be seen beneath the broken carapace of a famous portrait painted by René Magritte, this, moreover, is an open secret. It is this primitive scene of the social and psychic life of each one of us that the overhead-projected light of the image makes sparkle in an abstract and discontinuous way on the faces of those who are already there, sitting on the ground opposite it, and which the others now arriving get a glimpse of first thing, given the architectural configuration of the device. But the challenge does not reside in the revelation. The challenge, as ever in Olivier Bardin’s work, lies in the face-to-face encounter, and the originality of the device lies in the imagination of what it might be beyond the reality of the recording.
As Alain Bergala recently observed, the nub of creation in the cinema is not enacted these days in the shooting but in the conception and, above all, in the assemblage. The film critic reminds us that the idea of re-editing is an idea that came originally from Rossellini. It was with India 58 that Rossellini invented the idea of the film with variable geometry, conceived both for cinema and television. He imagined the shooting not as the concrete enactment of a screenplay but rather as a bank of images, with certain shots possibly being sold on to other film-makers, to make other films. The film was conceived not as something linear but as a sum of episodes, like the storage of small independent sequences which could be edited and re-edited in different ways. This dissolution of the authority of the final cut, which turned each edited montage into a one-off work, has become common currency nowadays. You can always make another film based on the one that is available to you. Victor Burgin referred to a similar experience involving the disarticulation of the film, opening up the possibility of a series of re-editing operations, by viewing a film on his computer screen. “I’m more interested in the film we remember than in the one which is shown on the screen”, he also remarked, “starting from the principle that the film has an evident content and face, but that there is always, as in this remanent image, in its evanescence, [...] the feeling of a latent content, of another film, other films, incorporated in the evident film” 13. This or these films within the film open up a second scene, the scene that is imaginarily formed by the viewer.
The software 14 used by Olivier Bardin to re-edit the sequences selected from his latest project, titled Je crois, makes it possible to bring an indefinite number of new characters into the dialogue between the two archetypal figures he presents. Through the inclusion in the original “film” itself of the interpretations of this dialogue by each one of the “readers” called upon by the artist, a further step is taken in the possibility of seeing Olivier’s devices as seismographs of the innermost movements of the psyche. In this latest project, the encounter does not actually function any longer as the construction of a mirror-screen of each of the protagonists in the sequence recorded, but, potentially, like an actual scan of the thousand sets of the psychic life of each and every one.
1. Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Le local : un paradigme pour une appropriation artistique de la télévision. Quelques remarques à partir de trois propositions récentes” in the Homo Zapiens Zapiens catalogue, Galerie d’art et d’essai, Rennes 2 University, June 1998. (Extract used in Compilation, Le Consortium catalogue. Galeries contemporaines du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1999). English translation.
2. The same principle recurs more recently in the device experimented with at the Villa Médicis, in Rome, titled The Circles.
3. Victor Burgin, “The absence of presence : conceptualism and postmodernisms” in the catalogue When Attitudes Become Form, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 1984, p. 21.
4. I am thinking, for example, of the table around which is organized the crux of Olivier’s participation in the project to invent a pilot Art School at Saint-Germain-Laval (Seine-et-Marne),
the studio table of Radio Suisse Romande, Radio Temporaire, etc.
5. The first French broadcast of reality TV aired for two and a half months on M6 between
April and July 2001, which was the talk of the town.
6. Arnaud Rykner, Théâtres du Nouveau Roman, José Corti, 1988, p. 20.
7. Claude Régy, quoted in A. Rykner, op. cit., p. 185
8. On Duras’ theatre, cf. A. Rykner, op. cit., p. 148.
9. A kind of therapy invented in the 1970s by the American psycho-sociologist Jacob-Levy Moreno. Jean Franchette, Psychodrame et théâtre moderne, UGE, coll. 10/18, 1977, quoted by Arnaud Rykner, op. cit., p. 65.
10. Le Figaro, 11 May 2001
11. Hervé Bourges, “La France se regarde s’ennuyer”, Le Journal du Dimanche, 13 May 2001. [“France looks at itself being bored”].
12. Jean-Claude Kaufmann, “Voyeurisme ou mutation anthropologique ?”, Le Monde, 11 May 2001.
13. Identités, excerpt from a public interview with Homi Bhabba at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, (April 1991) in Victor Burgin, Passages, Museum of Modern Art at Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1992, p. 163.
14. Pianographique.
