Short Tales / Tall Stories: The Video Art of Laure Prouvost
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| Holiday 78 |
One of the watchwords in contemporary video and photography during the past decade or so has been ‘narrative’. The candid, the documentary and the aesthetic have been sidelined somewhat by the pull of the narrative image, whether it be moving or still. Gregory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Sophy Rickett, Hannah Starkey and Bill Viola are just some artists who have foregrounded the idea of the narrative image. In her compact, raw-edged video pieces, Laure Prouvost provides narratives that seem to parody the whole genre from which they spring; with their wall-to-wall hyperbole and whimsical fantasy, they charm and disturb at the same time.
The surreal dreamlike commentaries that accompany Prouvost’s visuals in her ‘stories’ series are often only tentatively connected with the images that they accompany and even those connections seem loose and wayward, prising open the interstices of existence. Here we have surreal subject matter vying for credibility, gripping yarns goading us into believing, but just like any journalistic excess, always falling short. Is she trying to emulate real life here, cooking up complex metaphors for the illusions and untruths that the media would have us swallow? In her installation piece Untitled 1, we are shown the close up of a girl’s face, in a style that suggests an untutored amateur operating behind the lens, as she proceeds to recount a fairy tale adventure in which, in order to pursue a butterfly which grows larger as it recedes into the distance, she manages to fly by flapping her arms and launching herself into the sky. It is reminiscent of those childhood dreams of flying (perhaps tapping into subconscious memories of a previous incarnation?); in those dreams there always comes a point where the magic loses it potency, reality bites, and the practicalities of a painless return to terra firma press in on the dreamer. This girl is no different and as this phase kicks in she plunges in an uncontrolled dive onto the unforgiving surface of a car park, where a group of truck drivers, apparently on a mercy mission, carry her, bloodied and dazed, to a nearby park. There she is abandoned in the undergrowth from where, all but paralysed, she narrates this tale, looking up through the impinging vegetation, bringing us sharply and discomfortingly back to the present.
Many of the stories and events in Prouvost’s video pieces begin by charming the viewer with magically innocent, poetic scenarios, where our imaginations apply the sugar-icing to the cake before it has even been baked, and typically the whole thing progresses towards an unpleasant and unsightly mess as the narrative unravels and plunges us into sinister conclusions we could never have dreamed of. In Blue Bird the beautiful Blue Bird of the title, “with a bit of red on one side”, lands amongst a flock of dowdy grey birds in a tree and proceeds to pluck their feathers one by one, applying them, “with some glue from the ground”, to the trunk and branches of the tree until it becomes “like velvet” and the naked birds now pink rather than grey huddle at the foot of the tree. All the while we are shown raw video footage of a very ordinary tree in the middle of a busy city that is supposedly the site of this unlikely drama.
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| Abstractions Quotidiennes #4 |
Prouvost’s commentaries have a tone of quiet intimacy: she seems to be sharing confidences, secret observations, and her mesmeric narratives have a hint of hypnotic suggestion, drawing us irrevocably into their confused, illogical world. In her Abstractions Quotidiennes series, bland visuals of peripheral urban spaces give way to colour-saturated monochrome screens that have the same transfixing power as James Turrell’s light projections, but also act as a backcloth, a blank slate, for the abstract visions we might conjure from Prouvost’s eccentric, uncomfortably emotive cameos of the quotidian. Here things are slimy, things drip and slither, they are unbearably hot or chillingly cold, there are threats of violence in a remorseless procession of the repulsive and the degraded, of which H.P. Lovecraft would be justly proud. Commentary gives way to dense silence in her Tableaux series, where apparently silent and frozen portraits or still-lifes are betrayed by the minimal twitching of a finger or the subtle, almost imperceptible movement of fabric, which quietly compel our attention.
Self-deprecating illusions thrust us in and out of a bizarre fantasy world, which is both richly imaginative and outrageously implausible. The raw and flawed, artless aesthetic of Prouvost’s visuals echoes the motto of Prouvost & Sons Ltd. – “we promote imperfection” - and brings to mind a statement by the critic and commentator, Pavel Buchler in his book Ghost Stories’ where he writes: “to produce a blurred photograph has come to be seen as the exclusive right of the professional, even a sure sign of the professional mandate, whereas the same blurred image taken by the lay photographer implies a ‘human error’.” Here he is thinking of the work of such photographers as Uta Barth or Bill Jacobson, and while Provoust’s aesthetic fits neatly into this mould, her make-believe company, ‘Provoust & Sons Ltd.’ should certainly hold back from listing themselves on the Stock Exchange.
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| Untitled 1 |
Prouvost’s deliberate striving towards imperfection is clearly evidenced by such little touches as the title we see at the beginning of EVA, 42 years-old – which is accompanied by the commentary, “My name is Eva I am forty-three years old.” The sung narratives in Stong Sory (sic) tell us that the title is an aberration. In Vacances ‘78, in which the French commentary and English subtitles are at odds, a character called Michael steps backwards while being photographed on a cliff-edge and supposedly falls to his death, but he quite quickly reappears, an unsung resurrection, in this sequence of snapshot-style holiday photographs. While claiming to be photographs of a holiday in Israel, we can’t help recognising, in these shots, the grey skies and chalk cliffs of the Channel Coast, looking remarkably like Normandy. The little muddy estuary, complete with weekend sailing dinghies, looks distinctly unlike the Mississipy (sic) that it purports to be. These flawed and rickety claims to reality are a sham leaving us feeling not so much cheated as sad for the hapless naiveté of their collapsing delusions. The perpetration of such faulty fictions that only haltingly turn reality on its head, keeps the viewer on his or her toes. To feel amused is somehow a cop out here, an evasion of the powerful presence of the uncanny that pervades these works. The strands of parody, poetry and flimsy deception that are closely entwined in Prouvost’s canon of work, through which satire, irony, whimsy and fantasy seamlessly operate, offer us many levels on which to read the work; but however we choose to perceive it at any one particular moment, we cannot help but be charmed by the sheer inventiveness and sense of mischief through which these works have been conceived.
© copyright Roy Exley 2005
A selection of Laure Prouvost’s work is available to hire from LUX
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