12 yellow stars (a film-based project for Musrara Mix Festival 2011)

Artists: Arnaud Moinet (FR) and Henna-Riikka Halonen (FIN) curator Yael Schmidt

For this project in Musrara, Jerusalem, we will playfully question, what is the role of art in cultural exchange.  While not directly political, our work 12 Yellow Stars resonates with the contested borders of Jerusalem.  Instead of directly commenting on this reality of Israel and Palestine, which we have only mediated ideas of we will act as ambassadors of European ‘ideals’ and will literally bring this baggage with us in a form of a comic book story for young people about a peaceful Europe without frontiers, called The Raspberry Ice Cream War, using it a s structure for discussion during a filmed tour in Jerusalem.

This tour will involve some local participants (6), a local tour guide, us as two artists and the festival curator, and is based in 6 different location stops. Each stop framed as a cartoon vignette (tableaux vivants), represents a point of negotiation between the artists/curator and the participants. The participants will be framed into the vignette by the camera and the actions are based on their conversation with artists and curator, who are always off frame. The story of Raspberry ice Cream War promoting the idea of borderless world is functioning as a subtext, which is simply providing a solid structure through which a cultural exchange can flow. The idea is to approach the concept of border not only in geopolitical terms but also as a point of negotiation between local and European perspectives that allow something else to begin. The participants are not asked to cite specific dialogue from the story,

but instead the action is constructed through discussions on how its significance could be applied to the context of Jerusalem. The work inevitably becomes a representation of the site the artists have been invited to respond to. However, the conversation on the occupied territories will be never shown explicitly but is ever present as frame. This use of hors cadre has a political purpose and finds resonance in wider discussion on politics and art. In other words, telling of the story and the intersubjective relations are not aimed to be an end of themselves but will rather serve to unfold more complex knot of concerns about visibility, borders and social interaction.

The project aims towards potential unexpected turns in these authored situations, seemingly controlled by the ever-invisible artists. It embraces misunderstandings, using them as potential resources for further negotiations. The aim is also to incorporate the different layers of agency through which the contract between the artist and the participants is fulfilled.

In other words, in each 6 locations of the tour the local participants are positioned into the frame of the camera by the artists and are invited to direct artists and the curator who are out of the frame, through an action responding to a particular scene in the comic. The relevance of the act itself and the political and social significance of each location will form a part of the negotiations. However, the referred action is always happening outside of the frame. The particular scene is introduced by the artists, the curator merely becomes a facilitator for these negotiations.

RE-ACTION

‘RE-ACTION’

         

Flashmob in Northumberland Street, Wednesday the 23d of March 2011

         A simple action that borrows its format to flashmobs phenomenon, it is an action that re-enact a fictional but familiar gesture, an event re-appropriating and embodying dramatic images. This is part of a series of small actions called:

 ‘RAW ON RHETORISM’

First of all, a small Wikipedia definition for those who haven’t heard of this term yet:

     A flash mob (or flashmob) is a term coined in 2003 to denote a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment and/or satire. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails. The term is generally not applied to events and performances organized for the purposes of politics (such as protests), commercial advertisement, and publicity stunts, which involve public relation firms, or paid professionals.

For further historical details click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob

LOCATION OF THE FLASHMOB: Northumberland Street, it seems to me to be a busy consumerists street in which it could be fun to perform.

DATE: the 23d of March 2011

TIME: still has to be defined accurately but it should be around 3.30 pm. for beginning of action, and probably 3.10 pm. prior to the action to gather everyone to agree on the action before spreading out (more info to come in few days).

DURATION (depending on chosen action): 1 to 3 minutes long.

DETAILS: Following a talk (for students only), I’ll give at the University of Newcastle on the 23d of March; I would like to invite ALL those susceptible to be excited by the idea of doing a Flashmob on the same date. It supposedly would start at 3.3Opm. But it means that we would need to gather all the people willing to participate at least 15 minutes beforehand. I would suggest meeting behind the Church of St Thomas, by the monument facing Newcastle University. This way we could all agree on the Flashmob action we would perform few minutes later. The action remains to be defined with the students participating to the “Video Forum Programme” organised by Neil Bromwich.

It should be filmed in order to keep traces of this event but also to allow a projection time from which we could all share our thoughts.

Untitled#8 (Fall series), 2002, digital print, 40x60cm

BACKGROUNDS: I like the idea of creating a ‘work’ of art with limited means and in a short period of time. Even though I have been playing at trying to be an artist for a long time now!

I am also interested in the idea of making art as an unproductive activity.

As a visual/performance artist, I am combining and concentrating on the appropriation of material symptomatic of both Art history and popular culture imagery.

My will to gather a group of people to ‘perform’ a Flashmob comes initially from the interests I had in ‘moving’ my studio practice hors-les-murs (outside of the walls). It seemed to me, at that time, that performing OUTSIDE of the usual ‘comfortable’ place housed in a School or part of an Art institution could challenge my practice and therefore would question its ‘validity’. From my backgrounds in sculpture, I’ve worked with a wide range of mediums (from plaster sculpture, installations to photography, video) but I am still interested in using my own body as a medium that I can manipulate as an object.

Not in heroic gestures, nor necessarily within a spiritual quest similar to a ‘leap in the void’ of Yves Klein, I like to explore experimental but also pragmatic ways of understanding the world, taking the action as a device used to experience various situations in a desperate search for an adhesion to reality, as a child who is constantly discovering new sensations.

In this sense, it is an attempt to explore a re-disposition within the world.

By occupying public spaces, taking the city as a big playground, I was aiming to propose different ‘use’ of these spaces by trying to regain control over an environment usually impersonal. I tried to challenge our everyday behaviours through the use of various small actions: falling, running back and forth on a pedestrian path, trying to walk through a glassed entrance as if I was a character controled by the joystick of a video game player.

My focus were and, I suppose still, are to explore the way ‘we’ can transform the perception of a space (especially if this space depends on regulations and on specific rules) within the realm of fiction and absurdity in order to challenge our mundane, everyday dictated behaviours.

Using elements barrowed from movies, systems inspired by public manifestations (strikes, protests…), or simply using a strategy of interruptions, and glitches inside the ‘Matrix’; I often deconstruct actions as part of aesthetics depending on the very process of editing, manipulating and shifting between IMAGES.

It means that these actions can also be performed as if they were pre-recorded actions, examples: doing the same actions back and forth, walking backwards, walking in slow motion, etc… eventually creating a conflictual perception of the body, between its physicality and its image, a tension between the volumes, the movements of the body and its projection, its story.

This is for me a way of poetically transforming the time scale of a situation, this is also a mode of acknowledging how our gestures are nourished and influenced systematically by our ‘image society’.

Here are few links if you are interested and also tired of my pompous discourse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy4e7hBc-6g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crFWd7QigRk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgVgmgo82uU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI5FHIKqNoA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QULBrXiEt04

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTVgZCR0Pa4

PROPOSITION: THE ACTION ITSELF

(all participants are doing it at the same time):

·                The first that came to my mind was TO FALL ‘DEAD’/LIE DOWN (for 3min): it does appeal to me because it seems to be a dramatic interruption in the flow of shoppers walking by. And I am particularly interested in the fact that it is an action contradictory in itself, a non-action; falling dead is a sudden absence of movement, but it is still a gesture! No matter how people will interpret this gesture, it does carry a tragic effect; some people might find very offensive the vision of many ‘dead bodies’ in a street. I like it though; on one hand it reminds me of this TV series called Flashforward [1] for its connotation of the fear of a sudden end of the world, it is also similar to other fictional stories as in the music video for ‘Just’ by Radiohead (as suggested by Will Strong). On the other hand, it resonates with the recent events and give some ‘volume’ to over saturating images that are ‘flat’ to a point where as Paul Virilio put it in Open Sky:

“...The real is hidden in the reduction of images on the screen. Like a woman worried about putting on weight, being overweight, reality seems to apologise for having a relief, any kind of thickness. (...)”.

·                The second idea for an action was TO FREEZE. Again, it is a sudden interruption of movement but which is also imitating the medium video; marking a break as if someone pressed the button ‘PAUSE’ on a hypothetical remote control… remember The Matrix?

·                TO WALK/ACT IN SLOW-MOTION would be another possible action that I would find amusing to see in a cityscape. This a bit more difficult to perform, and it does require a lot of concentration…

·                I have other suggestions like LAUGHING or of course, as a counterpoint, CRYING for 2 minutes, but these types of actions need to be rehearsed and require a lot of energy, and it could be probably too theatrical… maybe for future actions?

[1] FlashForward is an American television series, adapted for TV by Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer, which aired on ABC between September 24, 2009 and May 27,2010. It is based on the 1999 novel Flashforward by Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. The series was cancelled in May 2010. The series revolves around the lives of several people as a mysterious event causes nearly everyone on the planet to simultaneously lose consciousness for two minutes and seventeen seconds on October 6, 2009. During this "blackout", people see what appear to be visions of their lives on April 29, 2010, a global "flashforward".

It was announced in June 2010 that ABC would not be renewing FlashForward for a second season. (Wikipedia)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I am fully aware that there is nothing new about this Flashmob action, but I am not proclaiming a revolution in the art world! More modestly, I suppose, I would like to gather some people who are kin to try to experience the city differently; by participating to this small gesture YOU will have a chance to appropriate it, and to project your own meaning to it.

‘If art can change life, this is not the role of the artist to change the life of individuals’.

To me, a work of art has to be inspiring; one way to know if it is successful is to measure how much it does affect me, reflect on me and how much it does give me the will to be creative.

When Joseph Beuys says: “everyone is an artist” it doesn’t mean that we all have to be painters, sculptors and so on, but that in our everyday tasks, no matter what we are doing, we should be creative, imaginative.

To continue on famous quotes, I would recall Robert Filliou with this slogan: “art is what makes life more interesting than art”.

This flashmob is a potential and temporary ‘space’ of emancipation. It functions as an opening to imagination or even a ‘glitch in the Matrix’! I am interested in the experience of the participants as much as in the feelings and interpretations of the observers.

Maybe, it is also playing a counterpart to what artists _ if supported increasingly by private funding _ will have to produce: ‘marketable’ objects…

Maybe this is an interrupted action, a waste of time and of energy, a gratuitous act, a non-productive activity.

Maybe this is a will reconnect with nature and the adventurous, ‘heroic’ figure of the romantic artists, or with the playful gesture of the situationists…

Or maybe, this is just not art.

Arnaud Moinet

19 March 2011

Untitled (or A Talk About Not Much)

Untitled (Newspapers ongoing series)

DAILY STAR, MARCH 26, 2007, Composite digital image of overlapped pages of the one newspaper, digital print, 80x129 cm, 2007

 

THE SUN, April 19, 2007, Composite digital image of overlapped pages of the same newspapers, digital print, 80x125,4 cm, 2007

 

CCTV IN PROCESS

Stills from ‘CCTV IN PROCESS’, monitor inside a box displayed on a bracket, 2 loud speakers, 2005, a video-performance using the security-system of an Underground station. The performer interacts with the editing in real-time of 8 CCTV cameras displayed on a monitor in the station.

This action was recorded in August 2005 in the aftermath of the death Jean Charles de Menezes.

re-construction d'une colonne sans fin

detail

 An artist is tirelessly piling up plastic cups in his studio. A dispositif ‘Reconstruction d’une colonne sans fin’ re-articulates the different objects used during this absurd action. When the fragile construction breaks down, the sound suddenly echoes in the surrounding space and imposes the rhythm of the action. Like most of my works, this dispositif challenges the viewer’s perception. Through an economy of means and a simplicity in its process this mediated experience is re-contextualised to question its validity; the artist shown in the video doesn’t do anything else than repeating the same action without any expression of feelings. While in his studio Duchamps used to turn a bicycle wheel for his pleasure; it became few years later part of an assemblage, the ‘reconstruction d’une colonne sans fin’ also echoes Brancusi’s obsession of regularly recording the states of his studio as a way to think through his practice.

Detail of ‘Reconstruction of an endless column’, monitor, video camera with LCD screen, plastic coffee cups, 2004/08. (The video performance is re-staged for each new exhibition). Quimper, 2004

A Man Who Knew Too little

‘A Man Who Knew Too little’
a performative-lecture by Arnaud Moinet, a mixed media performance that includes a video projection, a screen sculpture and a few props. (27 MIN. LONG)

As a performer, I propose to react ‘live’ to a selection of pre-selected footage that is appearing beside me on screen, its sources vary between scenes of classic movies and excerpts of amateur’s found footage. The performance questions the manipulative power of these images and their editing.

If you’ve got nothing to do, Do it on stage!
Jack Smith

The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures, directed by R.W.Paul, 1901

The project borrows its form from the staging of the 1901 British comedy The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures in which a country yokel visits the cinema and confuses film and reality; he as an entertainer reacts on stage to what is appearing beside him on screen. As a performer I propose to react ‘live’ to a selection of pre-selected footage but unlike in the British comedy, the images projected in this performance aren’t particularly spectacular and don’t necessarily impress the audience for their realism. Sources of these images vary from Classic movies to Youtube videos and question in different forms and approaches our relation to moving pictures, our memory, our desires.
The editing of images being eclectic and non linear relates directly to the way one can drift in front of TV while shifting between channels or while surfing on the net and it allows the performer to constantly propose some potential scenarios and to act as a counterpoint. Bearing in mind that the performer here is proposing alternative scenarios by including himself in a self-reflective fiction; the performer questions what performance means to him in relation with cinema, with art, with TV, and what it could become considering the overflow of fast-paced images in which we are constantly immersed.
The performance itself is constructed as a sequential series of little sketches or scenes which don’t follow a linear narrative, but rather deconstruct the performance itself as much as the experience of it.

shot from the performance at Platform00000010

The attempt here is to question the conventions of art, in particular authorship and ownership, the object status of a work and its permanence, as well as the idea of amateurism and the reconsideration of the medium video after the ‘youtube’ effect.
This performance however re-uses in its structure the ingredients for a good Hollywood movie recipe : A fall, some screams, a love scene, some crying scenes, some singing (even the bad ones), some mimicry, some dancing and of course some credits in order to acknowledge my sources.
The formal devices employed are easily named: repetition, framing, alteration of syntax, all visibly manipulating that medium which is known to be highly manipulative itself.


for more info go to:
http://www.platformnortheast.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QULBrXiEt04

earlier photography (Black and white 35mm)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Untitled#/18 (Accident series)

Untitled#04/18 (Accident series), variable dimensions, digital print. 2007/09

"While the topical city was once constructed around the 'gate' and the 'port', teletopical  "metacity" is now reconstructed around the 'window' & the teleport, that is to say, around the screen and the time slot.No more delay, no more relief, volume is no longer the reality of things. This is now concealed in the flatness of figures. right here and now, life-size is no longer the yardstick of the real. The real is hidden in the reduction of images on the screen. Like a woman worried about putting on weight, being overweight, reality seems to apologise for having a relief, any kind of thickness. (...)"

From Open Sky by Paul Virilio

Untitled#02/18 (Accident series), variable dimensions, digital print. 2007/09

Untitled (Accident series) consists of series of 18 digital photographs with various dimensions and combined for the recollection of an 'event'. A camera witnesses the aftermath of an accident in a city recording the effervescent activity around this event. The gathering of people, the work of the police officers and the fire fighters and the momentum stop of the city flow contribute to create a series of enigmatic images. They are strange but also familiar. A fascination for a dramatic event or for a form of voyeurism that could also be found in the media is contradicted with the use of a technique that gives the impression that the actions are in fact happening in a model and therefore seem to be staged. The process of short depth of field is a technique widely used in interior design magazines as much as in Art. Through the simulation of relief, in the attempt to 're-model' and therefore to give volumes to these images, the aim is to question the various mechanisms which influence our perception of 'reality'.

Untitled#17/18 (Accident series), variable dimensions, digital print. 2007/09

Untitled#04/18 (Accident series), variable dimensions, digital print. 2007/09

still from archive footage,
unknown source Brittany 1939/45