Pierre Bismuth "Following the Right Hand of..."
Team Gallery
This event has ended.
Team presents an exhibition of new work by the Brussels-based, French artist Pierre Bismuth.
For his ongoing series, Following the right hand, Pierre Bismuth does just that. He projects a feature film onto a sheet of Plexiglas and painstakingly follows the movements of the lead actress’ right hand with a black marker. The resultant abstract drawings are then enframed over a 30 by 40 inch photographic print of a still image from the film. The image selected by the artist represents the moment that he disengages from the actress, sometimes near the beginning of the film, creating a simple drawing; but just as often near the end of the film, creating an aggressive thicket of marks that almost obliterate the filmic image. In this way, the motion picture is occluded by a chance pattern that constitutes a kind of messy signature made by the actress. There is an undeniably fetishistic aspect of this work, as a portion of its appeal is linked to the actress’s name and aura; at the same time, the focus on the squiggly marks paradoxically negates the film, along with its star, by obscuring them with black ink, frustrating our desire to connect with the screened image.
The likes of Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Marilyn Monroe are re-animated in these strangely romantic artworks, wherein Bismuth holds hands with these women across a vast sea of time. These idols, who had diminished agency even in their most famous starring roles, are given a degree of authorial control through Bismuth’s conceptual interventions into film history. The women in Bismuth’s Following… series are not only the male artist’s subjects, they also participate in the authorship of the works. In a method that inverts the action of an artist like Jackson Pollack, Bismuth grants the subject the power to conduct his imprint and hence renders himself incidental, the simple facilitator of the séance.
Popular and high culture have provided the scaffolding for Bismuth’s practice. Over the years, political events, reportage, men’s magazines, Disney characters, fairy tales, the rituals of the white cube, museum architecture, and the didactic plate have all been implicated and re-dressed in a body of work that repeatedly returns to the discourse of appropriation for it’s guidance. However, no form of culture has been more present in Bismuth’s art than that of the motion picture, particularly work from the period of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.
It is exceedingly appropriate that Bismuth work with this material. After all, he is the only fine artist to have ever won an Academy Award — in 2002 for Best Original Screenplay with Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is his second solo at Team.
Media
Schedule
from April 02, 2009 to May 02, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-04-02 from 18:00 to 20:00