Claire Maugeais — What do we see where
we can indeed see that one sees ?
Paul Ardenne
Inheriting from modernity, but to contest some of its schematic
aspects, Claire Maugeais artistic undertaking goes voluntarily against the
grain of concepts such as purity, perfect form, organization or harmony (that of images and spatial
arrangements). Not to consider them as automatically invalid, but to signify
how much their historical valorization is often due to a certain naivete.
Citations from modernist painting or
architecture in her work are therefore not surprising, as the artist uses
counterpoints against them. Moreover, this approach of a critical nature
provides Claire Maugeais the
occasion for a permanent play of forms, in the sense of an unexpected
redistribution, an incitement to better see , and thus better live
reality.
In her study on one of Claire Maugeais recent works entitled The
Handkerchief (Le Mouchoir) (2002), a monumental floor piece in the style of
Mondrian integrated into the architecture of the Lyce de Saint-Vallier, Valrie
Chartrain explicates the artists praxis in these terms: The support chosen
matters little, whether it be weaving or the curtain, the rug or tapestry,
Claire Maugeais work strives to unearth the framework of things, to untangle
the threads of vision so as to reveal what is hidden or lost out of habit 1.
Each of Claire Maugeais works contests. In Curtains (Rideaux),
presented in 1996 at La Box, in Bourges, the view of an ordinary modern city
district printed onto curtains is rendered poorly visible by the folds of the
fabric. In The Surroundings (Les entours), presented in 1997 at the Faculty of
Arts in Aix-en-Provence, the glass walls of several entryways to this
establishment are covered with black and white photocopies that occult their
transparency. The theme of these photocopies, a frieze taking the form of a
montage of buildings in the modernist spirit, accentuates this out-of-sync
effect. With The Landscapes From Behind (Paysages par derrire) and, beginning
in 1999, the Frameworks (Trames), the artist embroiders views of landscapes or
urban places on different supports (plexiglass, architectural grids) which she
then presents back to front. This amounts to exposing not just the stitching
but also the various uncertainties behind the making, knots and detours alike.
There is also Trickle (Dgoulinade) from
2002 : beneath the orderly folds of a cloth hung on the exhibition wall treated
in the style of Venetian blinds, an image can be faintly made out, its squashed
contours rendering all description uncertain
Contestation ? Yes, a contestation of our visual habits and, by
extension, the meaning we confer upon the visible. In every case, the spectator
experiences a feeling of deprivation, either because the visual proposition
acts as a stumbling block in that it cannot be perceived outright, or else
because this severing of vision raises a
sibylline interrogation whose meaning will not be immediately revealed. The whole sparks curiosity and, et the same time,
revives reflection on our relation to that which surrounds us and constitutes
the environs of the body and its milieu, including their conditioning.
Interfere
Claire Maugeais work is characterized since its beginnings by
this inflexion, to upset the viewer and oblige him/her to modify (at least)
his/her vision of things, even and especially as regards the most ordinary.
Interference (Interfrence), a monumental sculpture from 1991 in two distinct
parts, made of two large superimposed wood panels, one abstract and the other
figurative (one of the panels is treated as a monochrome while the other is
covered with a photocopy presenting a view of buildings), deliberately
accumulates two disparate ensembles, a direct reference to its title. This
opting for a dual discourse is not in the
least fortuitous. It is a radical manner of indexing the idea that in art as
elsewhere autonomy doesnt exist, or else only by decree, in an authoritarian
or dogmatic manner. As for the rest, bodies interact, everything plays
with and on everything else, the work of art assumes the role of an interposed
reality in this game.
Interference is precisely the object of several creations the
artist will sign shortly afterwards, this time in the form of installations.
Thus for example the work presented in November 1993 at the Sequenz gallery in
Frankfurt, Where are you when youre where youre at ? (O es-tu, lorsque tu es
l o tu es ?). This work simultaneously
confronts the spectator with the classic white cube of the gallery but also,
inside this same space, with a wall painted green, another covered with
floral-pattern wallpaper, and finally with a photocopied view of a
factory architecture. A whole which as Sylvie Collier writes, manifests a strategy that consists in clearly
positing opposing values (such as domestic space/social space, private
space/work space, flowers/factory, nature/architecture or
pictorial/decorative), as well as the
valorization of visual connivances troubling these distinctions 2 . Without omitting an unquestionable
effect, implicit to this kind of work, that consists in blurring the
localization of the work and the spectator, a blurring implied by the
very title of this singular work, Where are you when youre where youre at ?,
a question that cannot be easily answered.
Troubled spectacles
Repeated consistently over the course of a
decade, Claire Maugeais interventions in the form of installations resound
like the damaging of a certain established order of representation, namely the one
bound by principles of coherence or homogeneity. Maugeais method goes against
the customary uses that are, as is known, inherited from the renaissance and
transcended afterwards by the moderns. It varies the point of view and, in so doing,
shows how turning the image or the mechanism of its consultation upside down
amounts to modifying its meaning and symbolic range. As regards this register, there are the multiple works of
occulting realized by the artist from 1996 on. On the window, this transparent
wall, Maugeais adds the cold image, reworked as a black and white photocopy
devoid of gray tones, of other walls, those of architectural forms common to
our cities or curtains of walls. An unusual spectacle that ultimately
represents the exchange of one spectacle for another, upsetting all values. At
Pougues-les-Eaux, in 1998, the mounting of images on the art centers windows
forbids the vision one normally has in this place, that of a rurban landscape.
In Slestat in 2001, where she intervenes in the post-Bauhaus style
parallelepiped housing the Regional Contemporary Art Fund (Frac), the artist inverts the axis of vision :
the large format photocopied image of a house repeated at regular intervals is
exhibited facing out towards the street. And so on Each time around the play
on vision is accompanied by a resolute
impulse to rearrange. Grasped as an object sworn to artistic appropriation,
space is also treated as a medium. Maugeais works place in the same way a
painter works a canvas.
Some might say that the act of pasting pictures onto a pane of
glass and masking the openings of a given place with imported images amounts to
an act of decoration. So be it. For Claire Maugeais however, the latter takes
on a specific character, if only for the fact that it escapes the constraints
of the pleasant, harmony, or the quest for plastic beauty which underlies the
decorative as a general rule. For each place rearranged by the artist is not
intended to increase its qualities but aims instead to propel the spectator
into another dimension, a dimension the artist wishes problematic, in the order
of deviation. The use of an effect such as trompe-lil, for example, proclaims
itself. In other words, it does not
dissimulate itself beneath the marks of a virtuoso realization, as is the
custom. All ambiguity concerning the desire the artist might manifest to
play with the concept of illusion is automatically excluded, contrary to the
rules of the genre. (continues on page 42)
Recontextualize
Another particularity is the distance taken from traditional site
specific art. The latter, at least insofar as its initiator Daniel Buren
established its rules in the 1960s, aims at unmasking each humanized space as
being organized in the name of complex codes where the double brand of the
Power and Control tandem can be discerned. Public space ? Never free, never
neutral, being of course that its arrangement aims at the users submission
(even a park, as can be easily verified, imposes its paths on the stroller,
delimiting rest and exercise areas, mapping out a chosen landscape for him/her
etc.) Regarding this given, Claire Maugeais goal is not so much to repeat the
obvious or to display it in three dimensions. It is rather to install the
spectator elsewhere, in this intermediate place between real space and symbolic
space allowing the materialization of a work that throws off reference points.
One might as well say, if one prefers, that it is a matter of installing the
spectator somewhere else, elsewhere.
Elsewhere (Ailleurs) is incidentally the title of an installation
realized by the artist in 1996 at the Marseilles Contemporary Art Museum (MAC),
an installation whose strongly meaningful effect is indeed to brutally force
the spectator to reevaluate the place he/she frequents. Once again, Claire
Maugeais occults the glass faade, this time that of the museums cafeteria, by
using a panorama of urban views without qualities photocopied and reworked in
black and white. The effects of this work reveal themselves for the least
paradoxical. The cafeterias clients are disturbed by the exhibition of this
rather austere and negatively connotated panorama occupying their field of vision,
even if it is their day-to-day. As Philip
Vergne notes, this reaction on the part of the visitors is all the more
startling seeing that the museums neighborhood is a mutating suburban zone 3 . This way of using the image, in which an image takes the
place of a landscape, obviously concerns replacement and substitution as well
as a procedure of inversion. A glass-walled room is changed into an occulted
and decorated box ; a glass-structure meant to let light through has the flux
of light blocked by the mounting of an image on the glass. What one would
normally see inside an exhibition space can be seen from the outside It also introduces a subtle play with
vision in that it uses metamorphosis 4. What is normally seen through the windows can no longer be seen.
Something else is seen, with the following consequence : the work rubbing up against the
place becomes an in-between place , it recontextualizes real
space as a visual fiction that opens our eyes, obliging a keen gaze. In this
respect, it matters little that Claire Maugeais use such modest forms as
photocopies, printed curtains or embroidery works. What counts most is their
potential to energize vision and the relations to these same things.
Tactical cuisine
It would be hard not to speak of Claire
Maugeais work without taking into account the method referred to by the artist
as sauce bases . Faced with Maugeais artworks, the spectator will notice various recurring
elements in the form of motifs disseminated from one work to another. What are
these motifs ? A fragment of wallpaper, a fingerprint, the wall of trees that
figures in Forest at the Lyce Samuel de Champlain in Royan (1999), the facade
of the Royan house posted during the installation And everybody wants to see
the sea (Et tous ils veulent voir la mer) in Slestat (2001), the home adorning
the windowpane of a work such as Forum (Lyce de Saint-Vallier, 2002) Using
culinary terminology, the artist employs the expression sauce bases to
designate these motifs. The latter plays a dual role of a reserve and a module.
A reserve, in the sense that the artist has only to cull from this compilation to find a motif which will
serve as a visual base for present or future realizations. A module, in
that the sauce base can be deployed in a serial manner, with the aim of inscribing such and such a reference, through
repetition, in the real. Systematized, the use of the sauce base
goes beyond an anecdotal usage. It is all the opposite of an occasional insert.
Beyond what is left up to the spectator to see (unless he/she is
familiar with the work and follows its developments), the sauce base works
as a repertory of signs making up the key components of the artists world. So
many signs of a strong visual and symbolic charge archived after much thought with their repeated usage in mind, as an
expression of the self, esthetic and critical interests combined. Thus, When
preparing the exhibition entitled Forest (Fort) at the Lyce Samuel de
Champlain in Royan, Claire Maugeais photographs the villas on the
seafront, intrigued by their uniformity. These documents furnish her with a new
sauce base , that she uses
afterwards at the Frac Alsace in Slestat, then at the Crdac in
Ivry-sur-Seine. If each sauce base relates to the motif, it has just as
much to do with the leitmotif. Their use as required, repeated from one showing
to the next, hints at the permanency of focal points in a work which is
ultimately more structuralist and conceptual than it seems : the body making contact
with the world (the finger), the succession of spaces one slides through in the
course of a lifetime (domestic space as symbolized by the wallpaper or the
house; urban space or the landscape represented by the panoramas of cities or
the tree motifs) The patently stereotyped
aspect of the Sauce bases can then be better understood as a means of ensuring
transitivity : to engage the spectator through a mechanism allowing immediate
identification. If the artists works, unusual or incongruous, can
reveal themselves to be intentionally unattractive owing to their out-of-sync
character, the sauce base acts as a transitional object, something like a
magnet skillfully drawing together there where the work divides.
Productive dtournements
One of the society of the spectacles
harmful consequences, among others, is to diminish the quality of the visible.
Too accustomed to considering that a spectacle is only worthwhile if it is
spectacular,
that is, calibrated for an emotional optical grasping, the Western spectator
can be qualified in terms of his/her paradoxical deficit regarding the capacity
to see and by extension his/her difficulty to position him/herself in concrete
space, there where the image is no longer spectacle, but the mere desublimated
transfer of the world as it turns and appears. Without overly exaggerating, one
could arrive at a new breed of blind, this visually impaired person who can
only see the unprecedented or the extreme but remains practically incapable of
grasping the perceptual contents of ordinary things, those which however
surround him/her starting with his/her lifestyle and the position of his/her
body within and in relation to the images he/she forms or rubs shoulders with.
Claire Maugeais invites us to revive in unison the vigorous cycle
of vision and the experience of the places in which the body moves. In so doing
and given the degraded cultural background in which she operates, it isnt for
nothing that Claire Maugeais carries out her provisional acts of authority ,
as she herself refers to her works. They are in this case the virtues of
inspired dtournement.
Translation, Francesco Finizio
1 Valrie Chartrain, Le Mouchoir, presentation sheet,
Lyce Henri Laurens, Saint-Vallier (Drme), in the context of the 1% for the arts
commission (1 % artistique), 2002.
2 Sylvie Collier, in the leaflet Trois interventions ralises
entre 1993 et 1994, publication realized with the support of the Marseilles
Office of Culture (Office de la Culture, Marseille) November, 1996, no page numbers.
3 Philippe Vergne, Rideaux sur la ville, catalog for
the exhibition Claire Maugeais, la Box, Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts,
Bourges, December 13th - January 17th, 1997, no page numbers.
4 Through the inversion of the
scopic code, the effects of replacement and the play on vision, one could
almost discern the historical ingredients of the baroque, an artistic style
well acquainted with these esthetic slippages, meant to promote the souls dynamism
and the faithfuls fascination. With the exception that, as tempting as it
might be to inscribe Claire Maugeais work in this tradition, artifice in her
case does not come into play.In Maugeais installations, each element is in its
place, and the mechanism hindering or redirecting vision is absolutely
explicit. What to make of the process of visual seduction proper to the Baroque
and totally out of place here ? No desire to please for Claire Maugeais. Quite
the contrary even, as the work in her case establishes contact to irritate
vision rather than pamper it.