Black Boxes
Wooden crates, scale models, mini video cameras and video screens.
Black Box (Oval Office / Albi / Biennale / Fiac 2006 / Incipit / Cosmic), 45 X 34 X 31 cm
Black Box (Studio / Fiac 2008 / Inauguration), 60 X 45 X 41 cm
Series initiated in 2007

The Black boxes where first shown during Lyon's biennial in 2007. One of them is part of the collection of FNAC (Fond National d'Art Contemporain).

      The project called Black boxes consists in a series of wooden crates containing some scale models of various exhibitions I participated in since 2006. The crates are closed so the models are not visible directly but some on-board mini video cameras show us their image in real time on some screens. Each Black box can be seen as a miniaturized movie studio including a set, a video camera and a lightning system.
      The word "black box" itself has two accepted meanings: it can designate both the exhibition set design dedicated to film and video projections and the recording device used on-board of the planes.
      The first sense of the word suggests the idea of a distinct place reserved for the artwork, a space that, in a way, isolates the works from its surrounding. The installation shown during Lyon's biennial within an exhibition designed by the French artist Pierre Joseph as a retrospective consisted in a sort of Trojan horse, inserting my own retrospective into this retrospective project. The Black box is a small autonomous space, a microcosm, just like the model it contains. It is a self-sufficient form, an artwork and an exhibition room at the same time. It also has a vocation to nomadism, as suggested by the use of the packing crate.
      The second sense of the word makes think of some previous works like the video Bonneville or the project Place franz Liszt. It links the Black boxes with the themes of memory, recording and testimony. Viewed from this angle, this project echoes an old and obsolete genre: the paintings of salons and collections, in vogue during the 18th and 19th centuries. Just as these paintings documented the official salons, the Black Boxes paint the portrait of our time through the representation of several exhibitions of different kinds and purposes. The Black boxes use the same kind of "embedded" structure: Some previous works, by myself or by other artists, are replayed, redone, reactivated. We could say "reproduced", but "reproduced" suggest the idea of a deterioration, of a second degree in authenticity that doesn't seams relevant here. The forms are transcoded, adapted to a new context, but this superficial transformation doesn't impair their nature (It is significant that one of the most famous "paintings of paintings" was the work of Samuel Morse, painter and eponymous inventor of the coding system). Then the Black Boxes can be compared with Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise or with fetishes that, rather than being the representation of some entities, actually are these entities.
      The fact that these forms are only visible through the mediation of some screens make it impossible to evaluate their size and thus erases the differences between the original exhibitions and the models. This process is particularly interesting when applied to some works that already dealt with the same issues. For example, the Black Box that replicates the installation Oval Office, is the reactivation of a work that was itself the remake of an existing form and thus constitutes a mise en abyme, the copy of a copy.
     The artwork that didn't physically survive the exhibition it was created for seams to be doomed to museumification. Its photographs are archived and then begin its afterlife as a memory, a fragment of an abstract corpus made of all the defunct works. The Black boxes series make it possible to reactivate these past works and thus to revive them, to circulate them again and to make them the starting points for some new connections, some new meanings.

     

 

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