Media and Myth
Peter Friese
in catalogue “Hésitations des sens”, C.A.C de Basse- Normandie, Hérouville-Saint-Clair, 1998
Jean François Guiton’s artistic use of video and its associated technology is in many respects agreeably different from what other media artists produce and stage. His spatially extensive works consist of only a few elements and might, at first sight, be regarded as minimalistic or conceptual, if it were not for the fact that they also possess a narrative, literary and on occasion mythical plane; in other words, a “content” that in a quite special way complements and overlies the technology the artist employs. On the one hand, the suggestive images and sounds of these works directly affect our visual perception, which is at all times ready to make associations and draw analogies. They affect our entire sense of physical-spatial perception, in fact.
On the other hand, the evidence and transparency of their presence in space, the clear arrangement of the technical elements, make one aware of the immediacy of the whole undertaking and its stage-like quality. In that respect, Guiton’s works are at once narrative, literary, mythical and self-referential. They tell us stories, and at the same time they inform us of the act of narration in the context of their medial transmission. In this way, they make reference to the media themselves, the hardware of which is employed in a sculptural form, thereby becoming a theme of his work.
LE FARDEAU, for example, a work that Guiton created in 1990, consists of a huge strip of linen slung from one wall to another like a large sail or an oversize hammock, in the middle of which is a video monitor with its screen facing upwards. The weight of this hardware, in the literal sense of the word, tautness the great soft sheet and lends it a form that only this load could cause. On the underside of the material, one sees quite clearly the rounded back of the monitor. The tensioning of the cloth also causes a series of tight upward folds. In this respect, one is confronted with what looks like a minimalist arrangement. The video monitor, however, not only rests in the depression caused by its own weight; it radiates upwards an image of a section of the same strip of linen in which it lies, as if the intention were to make the concealed area of cloth visible on top through a kind of light table reinforced by video techniques. If one looks closely, though, one will see that there are movements in this (virtual) section of fabric. At first, they resemble gentle waves, caused perhaps by a current of air - a faint wafting that changes the video texture. Then again, it seems as if someone were touching the soft material from below, as if behind or beneath this virtual sheet there were a living object, the form of which is not clearly identifiable. The image of this permanently moving strip of cloth on the screen is, therefore, on the one hand a reflected tautology; as if the artist merely intended to substitute a full-size video picture for a piece of reality. On the other hand, the virtual cloth on the screen easily bears the strain of the real load of the video apparatus. The image transcends the evidence of load-bearing and suspension and therewith the physical laws manifest in the construction of the work. It is a demonstration of a paradox; and at the same time, it is a mental image that fills the entire space. The conjunction and overlaying of software and hardware provides a typical example of Guiton’s self-evidential form of work. The observer is invited to participate in an act of meditation. The open relationship between the elements - a perceptible state of suspension - represents the special aesthetic attraction of this calm spatial work. The indeterminate nature of cause, effect and physical laws so confidently demonstrated here is the outcome of a clear artistic decision. In the case of Le Fardeau, this inevitably culminated in a minimal installation that consists effectively of just a video unit and a large piece of cloth.
Guiton’s works are narrative without being garrulous. They impress the observer without seeking to overwhelm him with confidence tricks in the nature of flickering screens that fill the whole wall or that are arranged in cupboard-like or pyramidal forms. Existing or newly developed technologies are employed solely to stimulate experiences, insights and questions that would be inconceivable outside artistic constellations of this kind. The decision, therefore, to use a specific sequence of sounds or images, a particular apparatus and the technical effects associated with it is always the result of a precise assessment of the factors involved, an expression of constraints innate to the artistic process. It is never an end in itself, in the sense of a presentation in which art avails itself of the latest technologies, merely to be as up-to-date as possible.
In LA RONDE, a work by Guiton dating from 1992, the artist creates a darkened space that can truly be called mythical. The space is impressively lighted and dominated by four screens and an ingenious rotating slide projection. The video monitors are placed in the middle of the room, their screens facing each other in such a way that they form a cubic space. The images on the screens can be viewed only from above. On the floor of this space lies a square mirror in which the four screens appear to be reflected endlessly, forming a long shaft that tapers towards the bottom. In this virtual mirror shaft, Guiton shows endless video shots of red molten lava that here seems to be flowing slowly, but all the more menacingly, downward. The images are intensified by booming sounds from the loudspeakers of the video monitors. One is reminded of the rumbling of an earthquake or the grumbling, crackling, hissing sounds emerging from the mouth of a volcano. In this work, Guiton uses the hardware in a most consistent manner: the monitor casings, which have a sculptural effect in themselves, are also employed to simulate an artificial volcano shaft, using a simple, but highly effective, trick effect with a mirror. The four black blocks in conjunction with the luminous bright-red fire and the thundering sounds from the loudspeakers are sufficient to create - using technical means - a sense of the mighty forces of nature. There is no suggestion that Guiton is manipulating his audience, however, trying to impress them with dramatic chiaroscuro effects and a mysterious soundtrack of the kind with which one is perhaps familiar from the cinema. Any such suspicion is dispelled at the outset by the clearly technical arrangement, the filtering of the experience through media technology and the substitution of a video film for a volcanic shaft, which represents an integral part of the work. The sublimity of a perfectly conceivable natural phenomenon is overplayed here with what is, in comparison, the ridiculous technical ersatz construction of a mini-volcano. That is something both the artist and the observer see, sense and reflect upon.
That is not all, however. Over this luminous video chimney - and over the heads of the observers - a seemingly endless row of skulls and mummified human heads rotates in a macabre dance. Guiton works here with slide projections, the circular motion of which is produced by a rotating mirror that reflects the images over the entire wall surfaces of the room. The motifs for this danse macabre come from Palermo, where a strange funeral practice existed in the Convento di Cappuccino until well into the 19th century. The bodies of the dead were dried over special ovens and lined up in rows for exhibition rather than being interred. Even today, visitors stroll at close quarters past these skinny corpses with grotesquely grimacing faces. Guiton lets close-ups of the bizarre, seemingly grinning countenances circle over the heads of the observers in the room. The linking of these two elements in La Ronde, the juxtaposition of the projected dance of death with the video volcano, leads to the creation of an intense overall picture that has an immediate correspondence with mythical concepts in our own cultural world: death and damnation, hell and purgatory, memento mori, apocalyptic images of the Last Judgement that once served to link the worldliness of this life with a pictorial concept of the life hereafter. If myth is anonymous narrative in the form of images, ideas and stories that are handed down from one generation to another on the strength of their own internal dynamics, then Guiton is a narrator of myths, someone who depicts in visual form things that have long existed; someone who communicates them in a quite special way. This is, indeed, one of the ancient functions of the visual arts, and it is an anachronism in the eyes of many people nowadays. Guiton takes up this characteristic of “religious” art (re-ligere means establishing bonds with the past) at the end of the 20th century and lends it concrete form in electronic visions, of all things. Here, he assumes the role of a self-assured mediator of images of collective angst and dreams, a poet of myth in the age of state-of-the-art media technologies. As such, he clearly demonstrates the continued existence of these concepts and the explosive energy they still possess; and he shows that they are capable of development in the context of what has been called the “history of fascination” for religious or mythical concepts. Death has always been something extremely remote, something absolutely different that cannot be represented, that can exist in our minds only in the form of a paraphrase, something that undergoes constant redescription. A substitution of this kind, therefore - the substitution of words and pictures for something that is really ungraspable - occasions surprise, but legitimates itself through its suggestive power and spatial energy. One might also say that, as a video installation, the true strength and validity of La Ronde lies in its demonstration of our failure to comprehend this other state - in its attempt to represent the impossibility of grasping death, to “picture” it for itself.
Naturally, an observer is required who will be able to respond to such an offer or experiment with his senses and his intellect and who will not simply register the interaction of these mysterious images and dramatic sounds as an intense synesthetic experience with a high entertainment value. The viewer must seize the opportunity of aesthetic debate offered by the work. We see, hear, experience and encounter these sounds and images in a most intense manner and must always be prepared to reflect on them and to question them as something made, constructed, arranged. As subjects, we are in a position to speculate on the conditions determining the potential of such an ambivalent experience. Part and parcel of this is the possibility of doubt, the ability critically to question the validity of an image in its cultural context. These are tokens of an aesthetic dialectic that is not concerned solely with the delights of sensuous indulgence. That is clearly an intrinsic element of Guiton’s work.
LE VOL DU REGARD, dating from 1977, is another interactive work that leads the viewer to an act of self-reflective observation. In this case, it involves a space, over the entire wall surfaces of which one sees a video projection of dense tropical vegetation. A soundscape of all kinds of bird calls is audible. Chirping, cawing, chattering, clucking sounds help to convey a kind of “holistic” jungle experience that is relativized, of course, in Guiton’s sense through the reflexive nature of its technical communication and at the same time confirmed as a video installation. In the course of 15 minutes, the green of the jungle changes. It grows paler and then intensifies again at the end, as if someone were adjusting the color control of a television set. In the middle of the space is a bird house on a pole - the kind one knows from public gardens or parks - with a pitched roof and gabled ends and with a small circular opening in the front through which virtual birds may slip in and out. Since the opening is at eye level, it also forms a peephole for potential viewers, inviting them to look inside. A link is, in fact, established between the impressive jungle scenery, the soundscape of bird calls and this bird house. But as soon as one accepts the invitation to peep through the hole like a voyeur, as soon as the observer’s head comes near the hole, the wild calls of birds cease, and silence descends in the room. Within the house, small-scale video images can be seen. In a kaleidoscopic raster effect, one discovers the schematic outlines of different birds flying over and across each other; and since the twittering has been turned off, one now hears a continuous fluttering sound that comes straight from the inside of the house. It is the acoustic equivalent in the internal world of the silenced external world. The bird house, therefore, reveals something that is visible and perceptible only when the outer world is excluded. This mechanism also functions when other people are in the room. In the inner video images one can discover something else, as well. Schematically or as a mere trace behind the crystalline, grid-like pattern, an initially puzzling motif appears through the fluttering silhouettes of the birds. At first, one becomes aware of a flesh-colored background. Then, if one looks closely enough, one may discover part of a well-known and controversial picture by Gustave Courbet. It is The Beginning of the World, dating from 1866, which shows the dark genitals of a woman between her spread thighs. In this work, Guiton treats not only the theme of “nature” or the “forest with birdsong”; he makes reference to a visual motif that is firmly embedded in our culture with all its ambiguity and metaphorical implications. This is evident from the title of the work: Le Vol du Regard, which in French can mean an “eye-catching object”, the “theft of a glance” or the “flight of a glance”. The observer is here seduced to an inquisitive act of viewing; but he becomes a voyeur of his own volition. This becomes apparent to him at the latest when the bird calls are silenced at the moment he attempts to look through the hole. Guiton’s act of homage to Courbet, however, which the kaleidoscopic grid pattern and doubling up of the image tends to conceal rather than reveal, is not the only reference to this work in the annals of art history. Between 1946 and 1966, Marcel Duchamp developed a remarkable and highly complex work that has received little critical attention to date: Étant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau, 2. le gaz d’éclairage, which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For the observer, it reveals a similar basic situation. Initially, one enters a kind of transitional space, in which there is nothing to see except a heavily weathered wooden door. Finally, one discovers two small holes in the door at head height that - what else? - invite one to peep through them. In this way, having been made a voyeur through one’s own curiosity, one looks through the restricted view of part of a landscape, in the form of a diorama, and sees in this artificial picture of nature an evidently naked woman lying with her thighs spread apart directly opposite the viewing holes. The scene is reminiscent of a peep show with its coincidental duplicity of events and decisions - or what else?
What Duchamp already knew and Guiton today revives in an expression of respect is that the action of the voyeur is based on a specific form of auto stimulation, for which the distance from an object of desire and its inherent unattainability are necessary conditions. In principle, a vague intimation and the restricted view through a keyhole are enough. One is concerned with visual pleasures, which are always coupled with a certain imaginative faculty, with the nostalgic transposition of a distant image into the mind of the viewer. If one can regard voyeurism in the pathological sense of the word as an impoverishment of interpersonal relations, here, on an artistic and conceptual plane, one is concerned more with the process of making people aware of this visual pleasure and the related imaginative faculty as forms of auto-poetic energy. Seen in an artistic context, the view into the box between a woman’s thighs is not a pitiful masturbatory end in itself. It represents the start of a new process of contemplation. Anyone who is in a position to reflect on his own role in this process of perception, to see his expectations, projections, interpretations and prejudices as part of this perception, does more than just register in libidinous fashion what he sees before him. One’s doubts about the limitations of one’s own voyeuristic view, the awareness of this passion fixed on a certain point here becomes a component part of the visual process and leads to an extension of one’s insights and experiences in a form that is virtually impossible in the context of everyday voyeurism. Here, Guiton does not make the viewer a protagonist of some strange and superfluous experimental enactment. He defines the observer as a subject capable of reflecting on his experiences in an independent way. The “interactivity” of this work, which employs sensors and computer-aided visual and sound systems to achieve its effects, is not the ultimate goal, therefore; it is merely the method or means employed by this spatial installation, which is transposed into the mind of the observer.
THE RAT CATCHER, created in 1997, is another conceptual image of a special kind. On entering the darkened room, one discovers a large number of oval loudspeakers scattered about the floor, all of which seem to be drawn in a winding stream in one direction. The layout bears a certain resemblance to an aerial photograph of a traffic jam on a highway. The small loudspeaker elements are linked by cables that follow and define the course of the stream. The significance of the loudspeakers and connecting cables becomes apparent on entering the room, when one hears a soundscape of small squeaking rodents, the incessant pattering of thousands of small feet, and soft scratching sounds. The associative idea of “rats!” presses itself on the observer intuitively rather than as a logical conclusion. The entire room is filled with these incessant sounds; but that is not all. From a place behind the wall towards which this virtual stream of rats seems to be heading, comes a dull rumbling sound, somewhat like the noise of the volcano in La Ronde, but here overlaid with hissing and gurgling sounds. If one follows one’s ears and advances along the path of the pack of loudspeakers (there are 100 of them, incidentally), one makes a somewhat gruesome discovery, considering the virtuality of the phenomenon. The technical “rats” are all drawn towards a large video projection that, at first glance, resembles an oval or rhomboid orifice. Here, a monstrous hole opens and closes rhythmically, droning, steaming, hissing and seeming to devour the stream of rats in a series of convulsive pumping, gulping movements. It resembles a flaring, boiling opening in the earth, capable of erupting violently at any moment; a menacing abyss. Here, too, associations of monstrous female genitals - more terrifying than lascivious - force themselves upon the viewer: a constantly expanding and contracting vaginal cleft that grows ever larger and more threatening and that, in a Freudian sense, may be seen as an organ of castration (dentate) and, in the sense of Georges Devereux, as a mythical vulva that instils both fear and desire in the viewer. One could say that Jean François Guiton here appropriates concepts that are rooted in our cultural awareness.
In addition, he makes intuitive and yet conscious reference to the (German) fairy tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which a mysterious stranger rids the town of a terrible plague of rats. When the citizens refuse to pay him the promised reward, however, he lures all the children of Hamelin out of town by playing his pipe, just as he had done before with the rats, and disappears with them for ever into a mountain cave.
Guiton does not illustrate this or any other tale. He does not degrade his work by making it a spectacular scenario for a series of events that could just as well be narrated or experienced in another form. He uses these references as the basis and stimulus for a special experience that can exist only in this form.
The ancient top, myths, archaic images, symbols and visions of fear, desire and death that recur in his work are not tokens of an attempt by the artist to uncover arcane signs of the past that have long been forgotten or become meaningless and to reactivate them in an anachronistic form. The opposite is really the case. These signs and images are still present in the media age. They form part of a traditional stock that has existed for thousands of years, during which time they have been subjected to a constant process of modification. They are still valid at the end of the 20th century. In view of the way in which Guiton presents them, we experience them as mutable phenomena, capable of reinterpretation and applicable to various situations. Even in the media age, myth still functions as a kind of “dormant source of information”. Pictures and stories are enriched with elements they have absorbed along the way. They are changed in the process; sometimes they are scarcely recognizable any longer. Nevertheless, as a narrator of myths in the media age, Guiton is not concerned with lamenting losses caused by the intervention of the media in some sentimental act of mourning. He is interested in an independent, modern approach to the wealth of images and concepts that still exist, and in their mutually overlapping meanings. The specific aspect of an experience of art as he sees it, cannot be replaced by discussion or description. It may well resist any attempt at verbal comprehension. It is located at the point where language no longer - or not yet - plays a role. And Jean François Guiton is convinced that video is an appropriate vehicle or “medium” for communicating this.