Perry-ism
Art Contemporain, Nosbaum & Reding

Opening: Saturday April 23rd, 2005
Duration: April 23rd, 2005 - June 4th, 2005

Aline Bouvy and John Gillis are a collaborative duo who have been working together since 2000. For this show they present a series of drawings and paintings, a sculpture, and a film. Normally, one would here go straight on to discuss the products and the content of this collaboration. Here, however, we are forced to pause, because unlike most collaborative practices today, the division of labour within the work does not appear to be rendered seamless. This is clearly not a representation of an ideal marriage ­ and, I might add that this would not surprise anyone who is personally familiar with the ´couple´! Joking apart, this is to say that the artists do not, or maybe cannot, paint over the inevitable cracks that emerge within such a practice. This body of work seems to be as much of, as it is about collaboration. The work consists of layers of each individual’s contribution that do not, or perhaps cannot, quite cohere into an image that is ´right´. The paintings seem not to be concerned with making ´good´ paintings ­ whatever they may be, may have been, or will be. Rather, the artists are forced to concede that an ideal reciprocity is precisely that ­ an ´impossible´ ideal that conceals the inevitably antagonistic power relations, fundamental to any relationality, either personal or social. What these works in their very facture constitute, is a ´real´ index of the process of collaboration, the asymmetry of which animates the works, but at the same time renders them disjunctive.

The works amount to a play of voices and images in another sense. Much of it is concerned with the phenomena of seduction, of affective allure, to the extent of the one being transfixed into a state of hypnosis by the other. Most explanations of hypnotism see it as attesting to the power of the word over consciousness, the power of the signifier to transform the taste of a lemon into the taste of a peach. But, is it not the voice as much as the word that produces the bodily affect: does not the truth of the joke lie as much, if indeed not more, in its telling as in its ´content´? Is it not the attitude, the demeanour, the accumulation of bodily gestures that produces the hypnotic affect? This affords us another way of entering these works, and that is to see them as being concerned with the making of a gesture as an articulation of an attitude, something that is ´written´ across the face of the ´work´, across its ´sur-face´.

The paintings unashamedly advertise their ´superficiality´ in this sense. Their surfaces, in their all-over-ness and in their details, are replete with motifs of fashion and style; maybe it could be argued that they revel in the superficial. But don´t we all have recourse to the image? Aren´t we all split between how we see ourselves and how we imagine someone else sees us. As someone a couple of centuries ago argued: isn´t it only superficial people who don´t judge by appearances? Which is to more or less say that the surface is paradoxically the ´deepest´ space we have.

Maybe there is no ideal viewpoint from which one can see the other. Maybe this makes a real relationship, between a couple, between art and its spectators, the image and the word impossible. But maybe this is not the end of the story. Is it not this very ´impossibility´ that causes us to desire? This does not necessarily culminate in the pathos of the perpetual deferral of satisfaction. Maybe the affirmative attitudes of popular culture, its collective forms of bodily desire, that these works attempt to ´tune into´, testify to the fact that there exists a means of activating this gap between the ´ideal´ and the actual. Maybe art is the work of the active creation of desire, where the ´It´ is not the forever-lost object, but is the positive act of ´going for It´.
Robert Garnett