STATEMENT
Painting in all possible ways, painting abolition of paint in the object, painting in all its forms… Whether I take picture, film, sculpt or install, I explore and exhibit pictorialism.
The disconcerting, disquieting, dumbfounding or even “de-real-ising” qualities displayed – sometimes simultaneously and sometimes successively – by my work, are due to the fact that art always differs from the conjectures that arise from any definition of its essence, be it materialist, rhetorical or artistic. I systematically set out to foil attempts at reifying both art in general and my contemporary offerings in particular. My work is at once polymorphous and protean and, as such, in perpetual expansion, as attested by the multiple techniques and protocols I employed.
WORKS
Iron Maiden
The words “to cut through”, “to fold” and “to curve” describe some of the actions that Morgane Tschiember used for the series. The colored layers seem cut in the space with a cutter. The torsions of curves reveal the metal weight, its force and visual sensuality. With the Iron Maiden Series, there is a tension between the feeling of light fall and the reality of the material used. Built with metal, their scale is made abstract by a color perfectly applied. The Iron Maiden are between paint and volume; not in between, but in what one constitute the other, its edge, cutting, purely logical and connective, that enable to pass from two dimension to three. The artist uses her control of color, acquired with her practice of paint, and revealed here by the superposition of monochromic shades. This is about the scenography of color.
Parallel
Morgane Tschiember creates a real road streaking the space and meeting this universal desire of gravity emancipation. “The object” does not use the metaphor but at the opposite it uses physical reality and its integration in space: it is on the dividing line between volume (space), and drawing (plan), painting (light), and picture (time). The black asphalt of this road was like a signature in the space, a graphic sign floating in the air.
Running Bond
The color is the link, the immateriality uniting two materials; it is the pink, flecked cement inserted and overflowing between the blocks of Running Bond, a series of walls that the artist builds here and there around the world, covering gallery windows and booths in fairs, the better to reveal their artificiality. The Running Bond Series is made of raw breezeblocks, as piled up ready-mades. Cemented by pink mortar, thus brought into relation two substances, one crushed by the other, not mixable and yet violently interconnected. The rough feel contrasted with the visual voluptuousness of the pink. These pieces also establish contact with the spaces in which they are placed by virtue of the supports needed for their stability.
Morgane Tschiember plays on the nature of the wall, amplifying its internal links, telling us more about this interstice as an opening, or even as a possible join, than as a spectator. A homage to the mortar that provides solidity through adherence, the Running Bond perfectly symbolize the work of Morgane Tschiember as an adhesion to the real, a matching of its most obvious physicality. And it leaves us with our backs to the wall.
Pop Up
Morgane Tschiember’s “POP UP” are wood volumes covered with lacquer. Their edges reveal different colored stratums that recall the superposition of glaze leading to a monochrome. They literally come into being. The edge’s thickness is blindingly obvious. Morgane Tschiember explains: “Out of the oven, they celebrate the fact of being, just like the non-birthdays in Alice in Wonderland”. They are not to question. They suddenly appear (violently), they cannot be ignored, expelled, outrageous, coming from no where : they were born. Morgane Tschiember says: “Color coincide with for, the event comes from the rapport between form and color, a kind of dispersal of one on another, or one in another.
A cosmetic excrescence of the conceptual flatness of the white cube, the Pop Up, considered in terms of its most general definition takes over the wall with generative possibilities that seemed to have been forgotten. A seemingly sage matrix, it takes on a magical quality when it blooms with all kinds of exuberantly colorful forms. But beyond this spreading of a space that is usually contained within the walls, kept away from our gaze, compressed and invisible, as if corseted by the stone and plaster, the coating and the cement, there lies another reality, that of a colour from the past or in the future, covered over and to be uncovered.
« TEXTES/TEXTS », Catalog edited by Loevenbruck Editions, 2009
« IN FRONT OF THE WALL », by Jean-Charles Agboton-Jumeau
The disconcerting, disquieting, dumbfounding or even “de-realising” qualities displayed – sometimes simultaneously and sometimes successively – by the work of Morgane Tschiember, are due quite simply to the fact that art always differs from the conjectures that arise from any definition of its essence, whether the form taken by this temptation
to define be materialist, rhetorical or artistic. Whatever the case, the artist systematically sets out to foil attempts at reifying both art in general and her contemporary offerings in particular.
Indeed, like art itself, her body of work is at once polymorphous and protean and, as such, in perpetual expansion, as endlessly attested by the multiple techniques and protocols enrolled by Tschiember to conduct her visual experiments and/or to make her works.
Considering Le Mur by Morgane Tschiember, which at the exhibition curated by Olivier Mosset, Friends, blocked the window of the Galerie Loevenbruck in Paris, one could, if only indicatively, evoke two works in particular: by default, or so to speak in negative, one thinks of the partition that Michael Asher had knocked down in a gallery in Los Angeles in 1974; and then by excess, the Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box (1965) by Paul Thek.
Comprising rough or ready-made bond stones, piled up and cemented together with a mortar died pink that for some might evoke minced meat, the wall built in the gallery window deliberately perturbed the economy of visual and symbolic exchanges that define the artistic field. By temporarily reifying this threshold between the (commercial) back office and the (disinterested) stage of any gallery, Tschiember not only distinguishes public from private space, and production from presentation, but also need (the need for culture) from desire (for art). In so doing, like Michael Asher, the artist indexes the false, optical and tactile transparency of the window and, by extension, the false neutrality of
the White Cube: for an art gallery is never anything but a stage delimited by partitions in bond stone or gypsum block, duly coated, smoothed and, generally, painted white.
But the kind of highly standardised architectonic elements epitomised by bond stones also bring to mind the – similarly normalised and serial – production and distribution of duly packed consumer goods: the Campbell’s soup cans or Brillo boxes, for example, functioned as geometrical modules deliberately piled up and exhibited as such by Warhol at the Stable Gallery in 1964. But where Andy meant to go no further than the surface that is indeed evoked by the scouring and cleaning pads contained in the Brillo boxes, Paul Thek was bound to bring back (good or bad) memories of the Pope of Pop because of those same contents. He therefore exhibited the same box, but opened it on one side to reveal a piece of meat: this wax handmade was as parellelepipedal as its container. Why? “At that time there was such an enormous tendency towards the minimal, the non-emotional, the anti-emotional even, that I wanted to say something again about emotion, about the ugly side of things. I wanted to return the raw human fleshy characteristics to the art.”
Thus, just as Morgane Tschiember’s wall denotes the literality of Asher’s action without equalling its radicalism, so a number of her photographs and videos more or less obviously evoke Thek’s vision of the flesh, but without either the visual rawness or the ultimately metaphorical cruelty. Unlike her elders, Tschiember works as much by allusion as by visual elision. As everyone can see, the mortar overflowing at the joins between the bond stones does not reproduce “sausage meat”; the wall simply produces it, but, precisely, using non-resembling, or dissembling means. In doing so the artist takes care to distinguish and bring into relation resemblance and verisimilitude, or, if we prefer, representa-
tion and simulation.
This is indeed attested by her photographs entitled Blasons or those of Série no 6, and even her recent volumetric paintings called Pop Up. The “breasts” in the Blasons series, for example, are in fact only images of rubber balls. And those eyes that we would be attempted to attribute to who knows what blind man or foetus, are never anything more than the image of a navel which, duplicated in the display, as in a Rorschach test, metamorphose into a gaze. Thus catching out those who thought themselves safe. What we might take as an abstract watercolour from Série no 6 is in fact only a photograph; in the same series, what we take to be a rotting piece of meat is in reality merely the image of some titbit that, photographed as it melted, quite simply gave the illusion of being a painting made by some unlikely Bram Van Velde …
The disturbing, dumbfounding or repulsive aspect of many of Tschiember’s images is due to the fact that they systematically hide the objects they reference. It is no different in her videos, where the framing, shot breakdown and editing sample bits of the real only to take the reality out of them, or even, make them unreal. That is why her works
have nothing to do with a formalist and/or minimalist orthodoxy that is more or less indifferent to the question of form (or of the body) in art, or with the verism to which all those artists who insist on content (emotion or “the ugly side of things”) inevitably tend or succumb. Where many believe that the body can only be interrogated and experienced in terms of aggression, by chafing it and forcing it to open up and besetting it with scourges (Chris Burden, Bob Flanagan, Keith Boadwee, etc.), and where others insist on rouging it, aesetheticising it or draping it with the glad rags of some social, ethnic or sexual community folklore (Lyle Ashton Harris, Laura Aguilar, Vanessa Beecroft), Morgane Tschiember points to a third way. For in her work the body is always both extroverted and introverted, and it is this insistence on reciprocity – which is in itself inherently plastic – between form (body) and contents (flesh), between the visible and the invisible, or between trash and glamour, that her exemplary Chair(s) series emerged. These works do not show the flesh either from a unilateral external viewpoint, or from a exclusive, internal one. In these close-ups of human lips, the limits between meat and flesh, like those between intimacy and inhumanity, recede as far as the eye can see, like a horizon. As Sartre would have said, these lips “float between the shore of perception, that of the sign and that of the image, without accosting at any of them”. At once meat and flesh, they also situate the spectator before or beyond sexual difference.
Just as no representation of meat could ever exhaust the existential and plastic experience of flesh, in terms either of (emotional or subjective) content or of formal content (frigid or objective), so Tschiember’s Pop Ups manage to elicit a sense of and desire for food without being either real or false pastries. Again, here, the artist deliberately maintains
doubt, and even cultivates it; here as elsewhere, ingestion and incorporation are not necessarily incarnation or carnification. And the limit of photography is not painting but plasticity as such.
And that is why, instead of someone like Peter Halley, who has illustrated walls rather than painted them, Tschiember is much, much closer to a Marcel Broodthaers – the creator, for example, of a Monument an X that was also made up of bricks and mortar (and a trowel). “I have discovered recently, he said, that to express the idea [or the con-
tents] properly I necessarily had to play with plastic elements. In a way, one always comes back to the plastic element.” Mutatis mutandis, was it not exclusively from their visual resources that Piranesi’s series of engravings, the Carceri d’Invenzione, drew their torture chamber atmosphere – in other words, their contents?
Duly noted, then. The work of Morgane Tschiember always starts and finishes with plasticity. Hence the polymorphous, protean body of work that she feels free to make. And that is not doubt why, through the diversity of techniques and processes punctuating her artistic development over the last few years, she is never far from experiencing, plastically and in every working occasion, what Goethe said of himself: “I have always thought that everything was my due: had they put a crown on me, I would have thought: that goes without saying.”
« THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH », by Aude Launay
No one can be expected to do the impossible. No one? Well, maybe. Unless their name is Morgane Tschiember. For this child of Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra et al., the world is simply a playground big enough to keep her busy for a few years.
We have already seen her go sculpturally over the top in Parallèles, a road 38 metres long presented in the exhibition Zones Arides at the Lieu Unique in Nantes in late 2006 and during the Loire estuary biennial in summer 2007, an incredible assault by brushstroke on an imported, painted desert; or her Iron Maidens, monumental sheets of aluminium coming out from the wall in sumptuous coloured volutes to conquer the exhibition space.
But to think of the artist only in these terms would be to miss out on a great deal. It would, for example, be to ignore her desire to conquer space in the purest sense, expressed quite simply as the project of “releasing in space the skull of a human being transported for that purpose in a spaceship during an expedition”. It would be to forget that the works which can be explored and entered on the ground may also be designed to be seen from the sky, like her project for a roundabout spreading like a wave to the edges of the city, in lines that blithely cross roads and parks and crawl over the facades and roofs of the surrounding buildings. A nice excuse, this, for crisscrossing the cityscape with
strips of reflective material.
Tschiember’s works thus attempt to include us in them, by slightly exceeding our human condition, and scale. Her Blasons (2002), placed on some ninety double-sided hoardings drew the gaze and touched us with their fleshy curves while, by their distance and height, keeping us at something of a distance.
Caught up in coloured space like insects in headlights, here we are now facing the Wrapboards (2008), at the heart of pictoriality. Sensually overpowered by the coloured glow emanating from this board that looks us up and down. A board? I would hardly dare call it that, even if the word is part of its name. The wooden board awaits us in its plastic wrapping, ready for various, as yet unknown uses. Covered with electrostatic film which tells us just about everything, it rises up as if self-evident, a false readymade because a composite fabrication, as Pop and appetising as a candy whose alluringly glossy wrapper we hesitate to peel away.
Candies also come to mind when describing Tschiember’s Pop Ups, those petites sculptures which pop up adorned with paint fired in the kiln, their forms bulging like fantasy cakes, their shimmering appearance concealing what is one of this artist’s fundamental questions: “Is a wall, a volume or a plane?” The fact is, we are never quite sure where to place her work, as painting, or perhaps sculpture? Her treatment of colour as a medium is constantly troubling our judgement of it, and the ambiguity certainly isn’t dispelled by her videos (Etre-là, 2007), or slide shows (Matière et Mémoire, 2006), let alone the Iron Maidens.
Mirror-like brilliance: everything is so smooth, so perfectly curved, pink and shimmering. Everything seems to be according to plan. The Home Run (2008) pays out its curve to perfection in a back-and-forth from the wall that opacifies its origin. A cosmetic excrescence of the conceptual flatness of the white cube, the Pop Up, considered in terms of its most general definition – which could apply to Home Run – takes over the wall with generative possibilities that seemed to have been forgotten. A seemingly sage matrix, it takes on a magical quality when it blooms with all kinds of exuberantly colourful forms. But beyond this spreading of a space that is usually contained within walls, kept away from our gaze, compressed and invisible, as if corseted by the stone and plaster, the coating and the cement, there lies another reality, that of a colour from the past or in the future, covered over and to be uncovered. This is what is revealed by the Pop Ins, these as yet unmade pieces by Morgane Tschiember in which star-shaped incisions are made into fresh new picture walls, letting out their “sap”, a colourful effusion of layered, candy-like icing, like time held between two layers of space. The colour is the link, the immateriality uniting two materials; it is the pink, flecked cement inserted and overflowing between the blocks of Running Bond, a series of walls that the artist builds here and there around the world, covering gallery windows and booths in fairs, the better to reveal their artificiality. Close in some ways to the work of Michael Asher, Tschiember plays on the nature of the wall, amplifying its internal links,
telling us more about this interstice as an opening, or even as a possible join, than as a separator. A homage to the mortar that provides solidity through adherence, the Running Bond perfectly symbolises the work of Morgane Tschiember as an adhesion to the real, a matching of its most obvious physicality. And it leaves us with our backs to the wall.
« ONE STILL SECOND BY MORGANE TSCHIEMBER », by Erwan Michel
Every point mass attracts every other point mass by a force proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the point masses. Isaac Newton
One Still Second explores three fundamentals through which sculpture works or rests. But then work and rest are always linked by the same idea: the load, that, when exercised, affects, and when inert, weighs.
First of all: verticality, horizontality – erecting. Since the prehistoric raised stones (menhirs), it has been almost a constant in the presentation of sculpture throughout the history of art, until Carl Andre knocked verticality flat. Well known: Brancusi’s Endless Column (a pedestal repeated in numerous piled-up modules), considered as inaugurating modern sculpture. Andre said that it inspired him in conceiving his own work, in which he put the endless column along the floor, thereby upending the constant of verticality, beginning the horizontal presentation of sculpture.
Next, the support: the sculpture rests or stands on the pedestal, or the floor.
Finally, this immaterial fluid, or flux, which passes through every sculpture: the displacement needed in order to consider the piece as a three-dimensional whole – moving around it – or the movement that the piece expresses by virtue of its structure, its lines, its empty spaces.
… we have known since Newton, by his observation of planetary movements, that vertical falling and orbital movements are the same kinds of movements …
One Still Second: a crane goes about raising the material (asphalt was chosen for its association with roads – it was also used in an earlier piece, Parallèles – as well as its volcanic appearance). The erection of this shaped asphalt is designed to make it fall to the ground, onto a floor covered with gravel, that being the condition for making the piece: the material is deformed, shattered, powerfully affected by its fall. A very specific way of sculpting …
From this fall thus comes the final form of the sculpture as the object crashes down and its shock waves spread horizontally over the floor.
Whereas Carl Andre sets out his modules horizontally along the ground, making them follow any curves it might have, then here the relation between the material and the terrain is the result of a collision.
Affected by the impact of the fall, the floor retains the traces of this violence, marked by the waves that appeared in the gravel: the fluid and the invisible are made visible.
The result creates the overall feel of a Zen garden. In the little booklet about the project Morgane Tschiember establishes a rather striking visual link that juxtaposes two regions of the world and two distant histories: the menhirs of Brittany (where she was born) engraved with circular marks, and the Zen garden, made of stones that are most usually volcanic, surrounded by gravel combed into curved lines.
… Morgane Tschiember also knows the Southwest of the USA, and the American landscape has made a big impression on her. To mention only one place: Meteor Crater, Arizona. The volcanic, prehistoric appearance of One Still Second can also be traced back to that landscape.
To these three notions can be added a fourth, which is represented here by the impact: contact. Not that of the burin on stone, but rather that of one material on another, of material against space.
Her recent participation in a group show whose sole locus was the printed support (5-31 January 2009, organised by Jean-Charles Agboton-Jumeau, in homage to Seth Siegelaub’s famous exhibition-catalogue), consisted in printing two sentences on facing pages, which pages naturally touched when the book was closed and were separated when it was open. These sentences literally stated the fact of this contact or separation. The words, printed in selective varnish (transparent letters on white paper) were, furthermore, only just visible. Opening and closing the catalogue, a real action performed on the object, brought into contact or separated the substance of the varnish and paper on the opposing phases, actualising one or the other of the two sentences.
Contact: the Running bonds, or bond-stone walls cemented by pink mortar, thus brought into relation two substances, one crushed by the other, not mixable and yet violently interconnected. The rough feel contrasted with the visual voluptuousness of the pink. These pieces also establish contact with the spaces in which they are placed by virtue of the supports needed for their stability.
Contact: the sensual dimension of One Still Second, accompanying the violence of its fall and impact: that of a paroxysm, a foundational contact.
This piece consists of a powerful moment of impact and its materialisation (including the waves that spread through space and tremble in the ground). It therefore tells us something about sensuality: violent and monumental, it seems to be exercised here in an almost cosmic dimension, and includes us in this new relation of scales.
Every point mass attracts every other point mass by a force proportional to the product of the two masses … we also find this law of the inverse proportionality in acoustics, when we consider the aural pressure of a spherical wave front spreading from a source point, gently decreasing …
One Still Second speaks to us of sculpture. After Brancusi and Carl Andre, Morgane shows us another way of sculpting, for one second managing to make gravitational attraction the event that leads to form, and at the same time the condition of appearance of a work that seems to be outside time – resting on and by virtue of the ground where the immobile waves are inscribed.