Eva Schmidt
Ghosts and Fictions
from the exhibition catalogue 'To a severe mathematics', GAK, Bremen 2001

Aline Bouvy and John Gillis make many allusions, and they do so from many different points of view. Their parodistic plays on identity and difference are dedicated to 'Severe Mathematics'. They speak from the perspectives of real and fictional persons, all of them players in a quasi-Baroque world theatre whose prop room is full of ideas and images of modernity. There is, for example, the model flat for the modern young man designed in the 1930s by Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier. The corresponding bachelor - a self-stylised, cultivated, urban individual - is introduced. His ideal reproduces itself in various characters, physiognomies, or multiplies in countless silhouettes. Photo gigs, photo models, photo backdrops and photographers encircle the fiction. Other models, stage producers and picture producers emerge. Fernand Léger advises his fellow painters never to want to make pictures of beautiful (female) models; the beauty should be in the pictures. Another member of the party is Hugh Heffner´s legendary revolving Playboy bed of the 1960s, a model in its own right and a stage for other photo models and photo engagements: on our search for the true bachelor, we have come a few steps forward in the history of modernity. The fictional Aline B and her view of artists and models, men and women, are played out on the stage on a life-size board game, invented by the pop artist Allen Jones. Here the paths of desire are determined by dice. A clever art critic - whose double gaze falls through double spectacles upon Fernand Léger as well as Aline Bouvy and John Gillis - mischievously introduces an informative reference.

Questions and answers, constructions and reconstructions, quotations and inventions, mise en scènes and revised mise en scènes are the elements of an allegorical text/image practice which - reconciled with the fathomlessness of fiction - wants to establish itself.

This text about the work of Aline Bouvy and John Gillis appears on a poster with other texts whose authorship is uncertain. The text is partly within, partly outside a field; the two have pushed themselves against one another. Other fields of text and image surround them, complexly superimposed and overlapping. They glide over shaky foundations. Multiple vanishing points are sought by plummeting lines and never found. A two-dimensional grid system is combined with a three-dimensional vortex, simultaneously reminiscent of Piranesi and Op Art. The text and image montage, which presents itself in the two-dimensionality of a flat sheet of paper or in the unsturdy space of a folded sheet of paper, immaterialises itself in a similar way in the architectural space of the exhibition. The room - floor and walls alike - is treated like a two-dimensional surface and transforms itself into an unstably folded space.

Fictions are not tangible. Like ghosts they are incorporeal. A postponed longing and the feeling of being pursued are ubiquitous. The desires revolving around themselves are clearly reminiscent of Duchamp´s Bachelor Machine. But fictions can also be conceived as instruments: 'Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change' (Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending). And that is perhaps the reason why the experience of ghostly presence, which is absence, is interrupted by 'Stop the Scenario' and a warning about 'The Return of the Repressed'.