| Nîmes, 2001
With Olivier Bardin and students from the Advanced School of Fine
Art in Nimes
A credit showing all those involved in this project is discreetly
written out in pencil
on the wall of one of the exhibition rooms of the School of Fine
Art in Nimes.By addressing
those featuring in it, the members of the school and outside visitors
can recreate
the complex story of this project.
“The experiment carried out with the students took place in four
periods. It mainly involves third-year students at the School of Fine Art
in Nimes.
First period : Thursday 2 November 2000
In Nîmes, Aurélie Veyron, Grégory Biondi, Marie
Laurent, Catherine Houbart, Camille Morhange, Eugénie Nadal, and
Nicolas Pene took part in this project in differing degrees. By setting
up
a base about the O. J. Simpson trial, based on documents found
on the Internet, the students managed to produce a fragmented vision of
this trial which so marked the United States in 1995. Easy access to the
contents and workings of this trial, with all its media coverage,
was the reason why the subject was chosen. In a given place and
time, witnesses follow
one another. Through their words, they reconstruct the image of
a real fact,
down to the tiniest detail.
The way the testimony is cross-checked forms a map. It is also a
map that we tried to draw
during an evening. A non-exhaustive map of the trial, like all
maps, but one whose outlines describe other territories. So for this particular
evening, we put this group of students
in touch, by telephone, with a group of older people (artists,
designers, composers, graphic artists, set designers, actors…).
This other group found itself in front of a silent televised image
of the rebroadcast of the 1995 trial in real time. An extract lasting five
hours, out of eight months of recordings. We thus had a recording fragment
without any content in Paris, and procedural fragments without any image
in Nimes.
By way of a set of questions and answers by telephone, it is another
image that we have tried
to recreate, not the image just of the O. J. Simpson trial, but
an image produced by encounters with people who do not know each other
and whose job is to make images.
The telephone conversation was recorded. It reveals three main attitudes
:
- An interest in the formal content of the image and the procedure,
a precision in the description of the fragments and in the precise re-creation
of a new image, often make-believe, by the by.
- A broader discussion to do, for example, with the implications
of the trial in the Black American community and the presence of the media
in a courtroom.
- The third type of dialogue has to do with a desire to meet among
the different persons involved for an evening in this project.
These dialogues sometimes have nothing to do with the trial. Each
one of these attitudes reveals
a certain type of behaviour and manufactures both the new image
of this trial, removed in both time and space, and the precise image of
a period of time spent between two communities
who do not know one another in Nimes and in Paris.
In a second period, I proposed to all the first-year students to
listen to a recording of this telephone conversation and to interpret what
was said. A new image was in the process of coming into being over and
above the last one, and even further removed from the trial. Through diagrams
and notes, the first-year students made certain choices about what their
intent was. Within
the map, trajectories were drawn. Specific and juxtaposed lines
thus re-create new territories. The courtroom and the position of the people
involved in this space are reconstructed.
A selective scheme and diagrams retrace the conversations and synthetic
and symbolic figures of the attitudes adopted during the telephone recording.
We thus put 62 diagrams together.
A third, fictional period consisted, for the third-year students,
in arranging these drawings
on a table and putting them together by family. They juxtaposed
these drawings in such a way
as to introduce a fiction. In the evening of 16 November, we propelled
the students into the same type of arrangement as on Thursday the 2nd.
New interlocutors were present in Paris, while,
in Nimes, the group of students had grown larger, extending to
other study years.
In Paris as in Nimes, the participants found themselves facing the
62 drawings by the first-year students. With these drawings ? and still
by telephone ? we tried to produce two parallel exhibitions, two synthetic
images, based on a model akin to the television structure, where one and
the same programme is shared by a community of separate people. Basd on
a classic form of exhibition, drawings affixed to a wall, we broached the
matter of the onlookers’subjectivity and their participation, in the end
of the day very studious among both parties. A camera capable of pivoting
on a tripod was placed at the same distance from the exhibition wall in
Nimes and in Paris. Now we have, in parallel, the filmed result of two
distinct atmospheres and of the work of two generations of individuals
at the service of the making of a common programme.
In a fourth period, I asked Aurélie Aura, a fifth-year student,
whose work seemed to be apt
for the experiment, to summarize her perception of the 62 drawings
by the first-year students
in an object, an installation, or some other form. A one-off vision.
Aurélie turned up to present the result of her endeavours to the
authors of these drawings on Tuesday 28 November. Through a selection of
words taken from these drawings, she proposed a perfectly synthetic and
radical object, in the form of a whirligig toy, which was much disputed
by those at the origin of all this. We were faced with the expression of
a subjectivity, which seemed simplistic in the eyes
of the first-year students. What was involved was a child’s toy,
a plastic giraffe which made
a “pooey-pooey” noise.
In four periods we told the short tale of the making of a certain
type of imagery, we made
a subjective model of the story. Specific attitudes were expressed.
Visions criss-crossed
with each other. Instead of continuing indefinitely to make new
forms, we said to ourselves
that it was better, now, to pose as historians of this short tale.”
Olivier Bardin |
