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 traces a piece of research on the hanging of paintings, begun in 2015 for Spectre, my first solo exhibition, at Espace Quark in Geneva. The book is edited like a film. The colophon reads as opening credits, the montage follows rules stated by Hitchcock – show the place first, make a secret appearance – and its cyan comes from Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973).
The publication acts as an interface: the catalogue of Spectre and the guide to 2080 (MMLXXX), at ZQM in Berlin in 2017. In that show it reappeared as silkscreened cushions on the floor, Andy SCREEN (I, II, III), and a video, SCREEN Subtitles, carried its text. Every page of the book is a silkscreen on canvas.

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.

The diamond-shaped Plainpalais square reveals artists’ neon works on top of the surrounding buildings.

Expodrome, by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, sets the frame.



ALFREDO ACETO

Rue de la Muse links the square to the exhibition space. Alfredo Aceto lived on this street from 2015 to 2016.



ELISA LANGLOIS

At that time, the exhibition Aristarco at Quark, Geneva, can be seen on RTS television, where the artist Frédéric Gabioud talks with the French humorist Élie Semoun.

I am the Hitchcockian viewer.



FRÉDÉRIC GABIOUD

The night of my opening, Frédéric Gabioud wears the title of my show on his cap: Spectre.



JOHN MCCRACKEN

‘Okay, smart guy, explain this one.’ is a handwritten note by John McCracken.

Elisa Langlois, the curator, wanted to borrow the punchline as the title of my show.



1. DAN GRAHAM
2. Kate Moss

Figurative by Dan Graham combines conceptual art and magazine advertising. The 1993 Calvin Klein Obsession campaign replaces the original right-hand page of Harper’s Bazaar, 1968.

Calvin Klein was one of the first ideas behind the show. John Calvin was mostly active in Geneva, and Yves Klein claimed the paternity of the modern monochrome.



DAVID BOWMAN

John McCracken was thought to be the artist behind the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He strongly believed in UFOs.

The room where the old David Bowman finally faces the monolith brings a classical setting and science fiction together.



FÉLIX GONZÁLEZ-TORRES

Emotional minimalism.

Untitled (Loverboy) by Félix González-Torres expresses a loss we will never know in depth. The artist materialises it only as a pale blue, diaphanous surface.

McCracken, Figurative, Obsession, 2001, Félix González-Torres: these are my preparatory sketches for the show.



#aaafff

The first physical gesture is a monochrome painted curtain, 16 metres long. The curtain was made but never exhibited. It is rolled up inside painted wooden canvases, assembled together as a crate. The crate belongs to Morel, a series of works in which tests are stored.



MATHILDE DE FLANDRE

The Bayeux Tapestry is the principle that defines how the curtain relates to the other works in the show.

Each of them marks a specific moment in art history. Together they were meant to form a narrative in space, with the curtain as the projection surface.



Morel

In Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel, Morel invents a machine that records the actions of human beings and loops them, reproducing reality. The machine keeps running thanks to the cycle of the ocean waves.

(The Invention of Morel is one of the key concepts behind the relational aesthetics movement.)

Seen by only a few, the enclosed 16-metre curtain acts as a ‘legend’ for viewers, who cannot verify its authenticity.



Spectre

A loose continuum and a hopeless cultural competition: Spectre opens on 12 November 2015, just after the twenty-fourth James Bond film, also called Spectre, opened in France. The opening fell one day before the Paris attacks, adding more ghosts to the story.



SYLVIE FLEURY

Obsession, the 1994 wall painting by Sylvie Fleury, is a step back towards the Calvin Klein advertisement and a leap forward to the idea of the empty blue screen.



1. PHILIPPE PARRENO
2. Spectre Version 01

Inspired by the translucent screens used by Philippe Parreno, my curtain becomes a 7-metre screen painting in the Polyvision film format (4:1). A screen has a shape before it has an image.



Spectre Version 01

The painted cloth is stretched by hand with 350 metres of rope on an aluminium frame. The whole structure hangs from the ceiling.



Spectre Version 02

Second version of my exhibition.

The central screen separated into three blue wall paintings, which began a new series in my work: #000fff.

Three chroma-key blue wall paintings fill the entire space. They split the Polyvision format into its three individual aspect ratios (1.33:1 + 1.33:1 + 1.33:1) and so bring the three rooms of the space together.

They return to the idea of a background behind the 16-metre curtain.

Through the film format and the chroma-key blue, the wall paintings clearly set the space up as an interface.



1. DELPHINE SEYRIG
2. BRIAN DE PALMA

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



PIERRE HUYGHE
Damien Hirst

This bronze head, which houses extraterrestrial life, is the plot behind the Zoodram 5 aquarium by Pierre Huyghe. It works like a Russian doll: a Martian setting contains La Muse endormie by Constantin Brancusi, itself used as a shell by a hermit crab.

Aquarium tanks are turning into a contemporary art cliché. They can be seen in the practices of Hans Haacke, Damien Hirst, Pierre Huyghe and Jeff Koons (among others).

When you enter the second version of my exhibition, you first see a painting that contains a toy aquarium truck, and the journey ends with a hyperrealistic painting of Walt Disney’s Cinderella Castle.

These two poles set the tempo of the exhibition.



PAUL GRIMAULT

The palace of Takicardie and Cinderella Castle share a postmodern arrangement of existing European castles. These cartoons give children a clear mental picture of what a castle should look like: a postmodern Tower of Babel.



L’Époque et son style

L’Époque et son style is the title of my gouache reproduction of the Walt Disney castle. It is also the French title of Authentic Decor, an encyclopaedia of decoration by Peter Thornton. In SCREEN the castle, like every page, is a silkscreen on canvas; it represents the gouache.



PETER THORNTON

The castle and the encyclopaedia form a counterpoint. Together they reveal the research on which the exhibition was based.



GIUSEPPE NAUDIN

For six months I wanted to discover a new arrangement: how were paintings hung, historically, before picture rails?

That question remains unanswered.

At first, paintings were set into wooden walls, like a fresco, but on a wooden panel.

Then the moulded border of the painting became a frame, and paintings were hung on picture rails covered with silk and embellished with trimmings.

What I became interested in concerns another theme of classical decoration: the monochrome surface has existed in interiors since the Renaissance.

Wooden mouldings held figurative paintings and enclosed monochrome surfaces that brought out their structure.

The monochrome does not originate in Giotto’s sky fresco in the Arena Chapel: it comes from the ordinary interior design of the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods.

The classical interior disappears during the nineteenth century, replaced by wallpaper, then by painted plaster walls.



Kasimir

A piece like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square could not have appeared in a classical interior: modern interior design made it possible.



Andy Andy Andy

The monochrome is not the death of painting: it is a very old invention.

The link between painting and cinema rests on their common subjects.



ABEL GANCE

Cinema quickly took over the roles painting had played in society: portraiture, the romantic, the historical.

Napoléon by Abel Gance, the film that introduced the Polyvision format in 1927, is a perfect illustration of this transition at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The silent film gives the viewer different perspectives on the same scene across three screens, each tinted in a strong colour.



1. ANDY WARHOL
2. ELAINE STURTEVANT

Video art appeared in the 1960s with the Fluxus experiments, Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and Andy Warhol’s entry into film-making.

In his exhibition of wallpaper and Silver Clouds at Leo Castelli, Warhol uses the silver pillows as a metaphor between painting and cinema. The piece was then appropriated by Elaine Sturtevant in 1987, the year Warhol died.



ADRIEN BRODY
JAMES FRANCO

The other way round, film stars have recently become fond of making art. After Sylvester Stallone and David Bowie, who exhibited paintings, younger actors became deeply involved in art. Among others, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Adrien Brody and James Franco are active in the art world in the 2010s.



GALA COMMITTEE

This twist finds another connection in the television series Melrose Place, which became a conceptual art project by the GALA Committee. Between 1995 and 1997, the GALA Committee produced contemporary artworks to be shown in the series.

As an example, their RU-486 throw is used by the character Alison throughout the episodes. Its pattern reproduces the structure of mifepristone, the active agent in abortion pills.



PHILIPPE THOMAS

IFP’s Grande Surface shares the same political message about advertising. The piece is a monochrome chroma-key green wall painting paired with a folding seat the visitor can sit on.

Critical thinking.



BRIGID BERLIN

… an object …

Brigid Berlin’s 25 Flushed American Flags presents a gesture captured by a photograph.



SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM Museum

… a gesture …

Maurizio Cattelan’s America is an object the visitor can use freely.



SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM Museum

… a decor …

The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney is an exhibition as well as the decor for a fragment of Cremaster 3, The Order.



Spectre Version 02

What Spectre means is an invitation to the visitor into an exhibition space that is an interface: a decor based on specific objects, activated by walking.



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.