ILLOGICAL THOUGHTS…

Presented in the context of Diagonales : son, vibration et musique dans la collection du Centre national des arts plastiques, an event initiated by the CNAP in France, in partnership with 20 art institutions in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, the exhibition Illogical thoughts... is presenting sound installations created for this occasion by three artists and articulated around speech and the illogical process of thinking it can generate.

Presented as part of the Diagonales project, initiated by the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) in collaboration with around twenty venues in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, the exhibition Illogical thoughts... is articulated around three sound installations commissioned by CNAP, in collaboration with Mudam, from three artists who, in their different domains - performance, visual arts and musical composition - are interested in speech and the illogical trains of thought that it can generate.

This interest covers the heterogeneous montage of vocal fragments, the construction of sinuous narratives, or the role played by certain “flagrant contradictions, which are flaunted, or hidden away in the erratic moves of a butterfly mind, or wild digressions” (Antoine Defoort). The title of the exhibition echoes one of the phrases taken from the famous Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969) by Sol LeWitt: “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically”, translating the game that positions itself in these works between logic and illogic.

Pierre-Yves Macé's musical practice is marked by the particular attention he pays to the spatializing of sound and to the fields of speech and writing. The sound installation he has created for the exhibition Illogical Thoughts... represents a continuance of his research. It is based on a diffusion device composed of five independent loudspeakers - functioning as “voices”, in the musical sense of the term -, arranged in the arc of a circle and directed towards a central listening point. The starting point for the work is a series of injunctions - imperative verbs, direct addresses - gathered from video tutorials aimed at acquiring certain technical gestures: assembling furniture, repairing a car... Detached from their initial context, these fragments of voices are combined in a composition which develops often paradoxical relationships between them, to such an extent that spectators find themselves addressed with “contradictory orders”, along the lines of the double bind, a term which designates, in the field of communication, the emission of two or more contradictory messages. These fragments of voices are also associated with more or less recognizable “sound actions” - the rubbing together of surfaces, flapping, percussion... As the artist points out, a complex dialogue is established between these two sound registers: “The spectator is both incited to act and relieved of this same action by the fact that it seems to action itself, with nevertheless a gap between the verb and the concrete sound which it is supposed to ‘perform’.”

Whether taking the form of sound pieces or installations combining image and sound, Marcelline Delbecq's works give pride of place to the question of narration. The artist develops devices associating images with stories broadcast in the exhibition space, arranged in the manner of a line of thought. For the exhibition Illogical Thoughts…, Marcelline Delbecq is presenting a fragment of a work in progress, titled West, in which twelve photographs taken across America serve as starting points for tales retracing the investigations of a writer visiting the United States to research the American author Nathanael West. The three stories included in the installation Trilogy (West IV, V, VI) thus follow the character through his wanderings, dreams and thoughts: “Faced with three images to plunge their gaze into”, explains Marcelline Delbecq, “spectators are invited to undergo the experience of literary miniatures read out loud, the legends and dreams of an America between reality and fiction. By echoing the images, of course, but also and above all by echoing the imagination of the listener.” Associated with musical and sound fragments produced in collaboration with Bureau de Son, bringing together the soundman Nicolas Becker and the musician Benoit Delbecq, the three stories combine two voice registers, a female narrator, and a man who, punctuating the first voice, seems to correspond to the character in search of elements for his own book.

Antoine Defoort usually works in the field of performance art, which he considers as a “box” that allows him to confront artistic forms (video, music, installation, interactive structures, writing...) and sensibilities. His grotesque universe combines craftsmanship, references to music, science, and cinema, and the misappropriation of objects, codes and expressions. The combinations sometimes give life to sinuous narratives, accidents “welcomed with open arms” that Antoine Defoort sets in place, carried by a harmony that confounds Cartesian logic and pataphysical poetry. Speech, music and writing are some of the determining modes of expression in his work. He places them at the service of his games of connection by making bridges and transpositions that may appear incongruous but possess a certain logic. “One could say that I make collections of connections, that’s to say, if you like, ‘collexions’.”

The installation EYESCLOSEDEYESOPENEYESCLOSEDEYESOPENEYESCLOSEDEYESOPEN (2010) that he created for the exhibition Illogical Thoughts... thus associates, in the style of logorrhea, different levels of meaning - discursive visual and sound elements, graphic mural interventions... - which the viewer is invited to experience through the prism of a video mechanism made from video glasses and a webcam. By superimposing text information on live filmed images, this offers the viewer a “heightened reality, 1.0.1 style, which brings into contact the real and its representation... EYES CLOSED and EYES OPEN”.

In parallel with the exhibition Illogical thoughts..., three video works from the Mudam Collection and the CNAP Collection is presented in the museum auditorium. Each of these videos stages a certain confusion between music and noise. Percussions graphiques (2006), by Algerian artist Yazid Oulab (*1958) shows the hand of the artist progressively covering a sheet of paper with black strokes, with a carpenters pencil, to a syncopated rhythm. “Leï-la”, a monotonous Sufi chant usually sung during vigils, accompanies the meditative movement. La Courtisane (2003) by the Swiss artist Denis Savary (*1981) plays on the incongruity of the image and the telescoping of sounds, by featuring a hurdy-gurdy player installed on a motocross circuit with motorcyclists in action. La Marche Turque (2006) by the Lebanese artist Ziad Antar (*1978) shows two hands playing the famous march by Mozart on a piano without strings, thus reducing it to the mere rhythm of a military march.

Antoine Defoort
Marcelline Delbecq
Pierre-Yves Macé

Curators
Sébastien Faucon (CNAP)
Christophe Gallois

In the frame of the exhibition
Diaporama/Vestiaire (Collection CNAP) by Pierre Leguillon
With a contribution by Donatienne Michel-Dansac.
04/11/2010 18h30

With the support of

Diagonales: a new tour of twenty contemporary art venues across France, Belgium and Luxembourg.