SCREEN

Based on a true story: Spectre
Directed by Arthur Fouray
21 silkscreens printed at Doc!
composed in Franklin Gothic std

SCREEN
artist book
11 × 18 cm
104 pages
2017

Publisher: Tombolo Presses
Editor: Thierry Chancogne
Conception: Arthur Fouray
Design: Arthur Fouray
DISTRIBUTION: Printed Matter, les presses du réel, Motto Distribution

SCREEN is a history of hanging, cut like a Hitchcock montage, in which painting, interior decoration, advertising and cinema meet through particular images. Its cyan comes from Fassbinder’s World on a Wire. I began the research with Spectre, my 2015 exhibition at Espace Quark in Geneva, and carried it into 2080 in Berlin in 2017, with silkscreens on cushions and a video, SCREEN Subtitles. That year I described the publication as an interface. The pages of the book are silkscreens on canvas. A page can become a screen; a room can supply the sequence. The notes below follow those connections, including the false starts.

Special thanks TO Marielle Chabal, Thierry Chancogne, César Chevalier, Lauren Coullard, Philippe Decrauzat, Elise Lammer, Elisa Langlois, Christophe Lemaitre, Julien Sirjacq, Jérôme Valton, Alexis Zavialoff

SCREEN — PDF

CH – GE



DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER

Geneva, 2015.

Around the diamond of Plainpalais, artists’ neon works light up the buildings.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Expodrome sets the frame. The word appears in fragments, then briefly assembles: a sign that asks for time.



ALFREDO ACETO

Rue de la Muse links the square to Quark. My friend Alfredo Aceto lived on this street in 2015–2016.



ELISA LANGLOIS

At the time, the exhibition Aristarco at Quark appeared on RTS television. The programme brought together Frédéric Gabioud and French humorist Élie Semoun.

In the video, I am the Hitchcockian viewer.



FRÉDÉRIC GABIOUD

On the night Spectre opens, Frédéric Gabioud wears its title on his cap.



JOHN MCCRACKEN

John McCracken left a handwritten challenge: ‘Okay, smart guy, explain this one.’

Elisa Langlois, the curator, wanted to borrow it as the title of my exhibition.



1. DAN FLAVIN
2. Kate Moss

In Dan Graham’s Figurative, a cash-register receipt appeared among advertisements in Harper’s Bazaar in 1968. For my montage, the 1993 Calvin Klein Obsession campaign replaces the facing page of Harper’s Bazaar. The printed caption names Dan Flavin; the reference in these notes is Dan Graham’s Figurative.

A name makes another connection: Calvin Klein. John Calvin in Geneva; Yves Klein and the monochrome. Not a lineage – a chain of associations.



DAVID BOWMAN

The monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey made me think of McCracken’s sculptures.

When the ageing David Bowman faces it, classical furniture and science fiction occupy the same room.



FÉLIX GONZÁLEZ-TORRES

Emotional minimalism.

In Untitled (Loverboy), Félix González-Torres gives loss a pale-blue, translucent surface. What the curtain means cannot be exhausted by describing it.

McCracken, Figurative, Obsession, 2001, González-Torres: these are my preparatory sketches, even when I have not drawn them.



#aaafff

My first physical gesture was a sixteen-metre painted curtain. I made it but never exhibited it. Rolled inside a wooden box built from painting stretchers, it became part of Morel, a series in which I stored tests for works.



MATHILDE DE FLANDRE

I thought of the Bayeux Tapestry as a way of carrying a narrative across a surface.

The works in Spectre would mark different moments; the curtain would connect them across the room.



Morel

In Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel, Morel invents a machine that records people and repeats their actions. Waves keep the machine running.

I read The Invention of Morel as a model for an exhibition in which images outlast – and seem to replace – the people who made them.

The enclosed curtain became a legend: described to visitors, but unavailable for them to inspect.



Spectre

Spectre opened on 12 November 2015, the day after the James Bond film of the same name was released in France. The exhibition borrowed its title, not its plot.



SYLVIE FLEURY

The 1994 wall painting Obsession by Sylvie Fleury takes me back to the Calvin Klein advertisement and forward to an empty blue screen.



1. PHILIPPE PARRENO
2. Spectre Version 01

The translucent screens of Philippe Parreno offered another route. My curtain became a seven-metre screen painting in Polyvision’s 4:1 proportions.



Spectre Version 01

I stretched the painted cloth with 350 metres of rope on an aluminium frame and suspended it from the ceiling.



Spectre Version 02

Then I made a second version of the exhibition.

The central screen separated into three blue wall paintings. This was the beginning of #000fff.

Each wall painting took the 4:3 proportions of one of Polyvision’s three panels. Across three rooms, the exhibition became a screen you had to walk through.

The sixteen-metre curtain had proposed a continuous background. The three walls broke that continuity into spaces.

The chroma-key blue left each surface ready for an image that was not there. A screen has a shape before it has an image.



1. DELPHINE SEYRIG
2. BRIAN DE PALMA

Inter, from Interview Magazine no. 3, makes a riddle with the monumental face in Brian de Palma’s film Mission to Mars. 



PIERRE HUYGHE
Damien Hirst

The face in Mission to Mars leads me to Zoodram 5 by Pierre Huyghe. Here a hermit crab inhabits a replica of Constantin Brancusi’s La Muse endormie. A sculpture becomes a shell, with another life inside it.

Aquariums recur in the work of Hans Haacke, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

At the entrance to the second version of Spectre was my painting of a toy aquarium truck. At the other end stood a gouache of Walt Disney’s Cinderella Castle.

A small travelling tank and an imaginary destination set the journey’s scale.



PAUL GRIMAULT

The palace of Takicardie in Le Roi et l’oiseau and Cinderella Castle assemble familiar architectural forms into places that never existed. They can become the castles we picture before we have seen a real one.



L’époque et son style

I called my gouache of the Walt Disney castle L’Époque et son style – the French title of Authentic Decor by Peter Thornton. In the book the castle, like every page, is a silkscreen on canvas after that gouache.



PETER THORNTON

A decoration encyclopaedia and an invented castle: two ways of arranging the past into an image.



GIUSEPPE NAUDIN

For six months I tried to answer a practical question: how were paintings hung before picture rails?

I did not find the simple answer I was looking for. The detour became the work.

I began looking at paintings set into wooden panelling, where the image, its border and the wall belonged to one arrangement.

Frames, mouldings, silk and trimmings made it difficult to separate a painting from the room that held it.

What interested me most was the apparently empty part: a plain field of colour already present in an interior.

A moulding could frame a figurative scene or a monochrome surface. I started looking at both.

What if I approached the monochrome through those rooms, rather than beginning with the blue of Giotto’s celestial fresco in the Arena Chapel? Decoration gave me another history to follow.

Wallpaper and painted plaster changed the relation between an image and its surroundings. I wanted to know what a room allowed a painting to become.



Kasimir

Could I picture Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square inside one of those interiors? The difficulty of placing it interested me as much as the image itself.



Andy Andy Andy

The monochrome did not have to announce the death of painting. It could also be something painting had borrowed from the room.

And cinema could take up subjects that had once occupied paintings: faces, landscapes, history.



ABEL GANCE

This was a way into film through painting, rather than a claim that one had replaced the other.

In Napoléon (1927), Abel Gance expanded the image across three screens with Polyvision.

One frame could open into a panorama or divide into several views. A sequence could also be an arrangement in space.



1. ANDY WARHOL
2. ELAINE STURTEVANT

In the 1960s, experimental film, performance and exhibitions crossed through Fluxus, Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and Andy Warhol’s films.

In Warhol’s 1966 exhibition at Leo Castelli, Cow Wallpaper met Silver Clouds. I see the floating silver cushions as a passage between a painted surface and a moving image. When Elaine Sturtevant repeated Silver Clouds in 1987, the year Warhol died, the recognisable form became the means of another work.



ADRIEN BRODY
JAMES FRANCO

The traffic also runs through celebrity. The names Sylvester Stallone, David Bowie, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Adrien Brody and James Franco move between cinema, music and the art world – through making, exhibiting or collecting. Being visible in one field changes how a name arrives in another.



GALA COMMITTEE

From 1995 to 1997, the GALA Committee placed artworks inside Melrose Place as props. In the Name of the Place let art enter a television series without stopping it for an exhibition.

Their RU-486 Quilt (1996) carried the molecular structure of mifepristone into a bedroom scene. A decorative pattern could contain information the script did not state.



PHILIPPE THOMAS

IFP’s Grande Surface pairs a chroma-key-green wall painting with a folding seat. Sitting down puts the visitor in relation to a surface prepared for an image. Advertising, display and looking share the same small arrangement.

Three more ways for a work to enter a scene:



BRIGID BERLIN

… an object …

Brigid Berlin’s 25 Flushed American Flags: a gesture caught by photography.



SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM Museum

… a gesture …

Maurizio Cattelan’s America: a sculpture made to be used.



SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM Museum

… a decor …

The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney: an exhibition becomes a setting for The Order, a sequence in Cremaster 3.



Spectre Version 02

In Spectre, I wanted the exhibition to be an interface and a decor, made from particular objects rather than a continuous story. The visitor supplies the movement. An object, a gesture, a background: walking puts them into relation.



Spectre Version 02



EVE KENDALL



A – LA FEMME BRUNE

‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’
TRAILER VOICE-OVER
1961
TEXT EXCERPT

A large international hotel …
… immense and baroque …
… with sumptuous but frigid decor
A stranger wanders from hall to hall … 
… down endless corridors …
… in search of a woman
He tells her they met …
‘Last year …’
Try to remember,
… that they had a passionate love affair …
… that she herself set this rendezvous …
… and that he is going to take her away.
But she claims she does not know him.
Impossible, I tell you. I have never even been to Frederiksbad. 
He insists, but she protests even more.
What room? I have never been in any bedroom with you
You will not remember …
… because you are afraid
And you do not recognise this photo either?
The young woman cedes ground.
The stranger – serious, confident – gathers more and more proof.
Who is right? Who is lying?
Is he a mere seducer? A madman?
Or has he just confused two faces?
What really happened ‘last year’?
You, the viewer, must answer these questions.
Watch carefully:
… an object …
… a gesture …
… a decor …

Quotes from Brigid Berlin and Andy Warhol in ‘Warhol’ by David Bailey, in 1973:

– And I did a Jasper Johns I flushed out twenty-five American flags.
Got them during the flush.
– What?
I am doing FLUSH ART for a long time.
– The ocean is the biggest abstract thing around. There is a lot of rocks here too.
– I like rocks.
Oh yeah, my favourite art is the ROCK ART.’
– What’s that?
– Oh people just dig up land and move the rock,
something like that.