| Apparitions: Martin Patrick
It's sometimes easier to talk about real issues in a playful way. People can listen more easily because you don't frighten them with ideologies. – ML[1]
The young French post-conceptual artist Matthieu Laurette (b.1970, based in Paris and New York) has been steadily increasing his international profile over the past decade with his playful, captivating, and frequently subversive creative tactics which involve both interventions in and metacommentary on the overlapping worlds of commerce, media, and politics. Laurette has remarked, "My role as an artist is to engage with this society of the spectacle and expose its workings."[2] Indeed he has even been labeled by one critic "the offspring of … Andy Warhol and Guy Debord."[3] I plan to examine in this essay a number of ways by which Laurette has transformed standard notions of "public art" into a mode of artistic-critical practice which derives in varying degrees from the preceding movements of fluxus, pop, appropriation, and conceptualism, and as well the enduring intellectual influence of the Situationist International. Moreover it is Laurette's very use of an approach which incorporates a wily playfulness and orchestrated pranks that frames his work in an entirely appropriate manner for the period since the 1990s. Thus Laurette negotiates the terrain of visual culture after postmodernism proper in which art just as popular entertainment operates at the intersection between the real and the fantastical. In this context, fictive memoirs, "reality television," pseudo-documentaries, political propaganda, and nostalgia for contemporary art touchstones are all characteristic cultural phenomena. I will argue that the complexity of Laurette's practice derives from his ability to learn from the past examples of other artists dealing with similar territory, yet by continually involving himself in new experiences through repeated improvisation and play he has developed a singular artistic approach that initially investigates the seemingly superficial but by the end possesses a remarkable depth and scope. Laurette serves as a key example of a category I would call the New Public Artist, that is, an artist who engages with the public sphere in decidedly tactical fashion, often using both the techniques of advertising and the technology of the internet. The stability and rigor of old fashioned sculptural and monumental projects have given way to virtuality, the transitory, and the spectacle. As Miwon Kwon has pointed out in her detailed analysis of site-specificity: In so doing, I would assert in turn that Laurette's engagement with the idea of play manifests itself in such a way that a handful of dominant concerns emerge to the surface, if one breaks them down rather schematically. (I am not unaware that there is an inevitable amount of overlap when considering Laurette's practice in this fashion): (1) Establishment of a specific persona for each given piece/work, or rather the use of shifting malleable versions of a "character" known as "Matthieu Laurette." Through this role-playing, Laurette inflects his ideas in a significantly different manner on a case-by-case basis. (2) Creation of pranks, or art/life situations in which the artist plays tricks, sometimes on the spectator, while almost as often the spectator witnesses documentary evidence of a previous intervention, and is placed in role of a knowing co-conspirator in on the joke. (3) Use of rules and games set up by the artist to often echo in parodic fashion the cultural boundaries and structures the artist seeks to confront. In a sense Laurette creates new games to mirror in a distorted way the problematic nature of the existing ones. By intercepting these circuits he calls attention to many convergent issues at once. (4) Entertainment is both a target and a goal for Laurette's pieces. When political critique occurs in Laurette's work, it is distanced and becomes diffuse through mediation, and lighter, more satirical humor. Laurette's work is filtered through a contemporary exhaustion with the political art of earlier decades. (5) A Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach which enables many of the previously mentioned concerns to be developed and elaborated in reasonably autonomous fashion. This approach also follows the "relational aesthetic" paradigm as outlined by critic Nicolas Bourriaud in recent years.
PERSONA(E) Laurette became known early on in tabloids and many other non-art related publications for his promotion of "Money Back Shopping," so to speak living "for free" by using only products which include offers to refund price of purchase (Satisfaction guaranteed…and so on.) Laurette's use of his Money Back Shopping premise in effect turns the singular artist (or consumer using information provided by the artist) symbolically against the hegemony of global commerce. Moreover as the artist shares his experiences with other "shoppers" the entire piece transforms an interactive tangle of tabloid accounts about Laurette's good deals that is, "everybody loves an eccentric." One could ask whether Laurette's delving into this project becomes a life-activity or an art-piece. Ironically a work which began and continued while garnering attention mostly exterior to the art milieu becomes a launching pad for the artist into an artworld increasingly sympathetic to such ambiguous initiatives. The crash of the overheated market of the 1980s was another enabling factor for more non-traditional voices to be heard, although Laurette's focus on the game of commercial coupon collecting flips the focus back toward quotidian economic concerns. Furthermore the very focus on everyday life and conceptual circuits of distribution references both classic artworks of the 1960s and 70s (such as those of Hans Haacke or Daniel Buren), and theoretical treatises such as Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. In this now-canonical text of cultural studies, the author states that "users make innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules. We must determine the procedures, bases, effects, and possibilities of this collective activity."[5] The personae which Laurette creates fall under three rough headings: a) the populist/relational Matthieu, b) the director/choreographer Matthieu, and c) the subversive/provocateur Matthieu. In the former, the artist appears to state: I can show you how this—Money Back Shopping—is done. Yes, this is a scheme but I will show you not only that this is a game, but more importantly how it is played. This stance emphasizes possibilities of shared interchange. Through its documentation in human-interest stories for newspapers and magazines new spectators can learn of his novel approach. In the second instance, the artist implies that he is controlling this situation and setting up all the rules by which the game is played. The spectator becomes only a secondary (but necessary) participant in this potential site for further activity. In the third case the artist interrogates the system and provides skeptical gestures toward attacking its premises, but ultimately these efforts are limited in scope or actual threat. Laurette's Money Back Shopping project eventually culminated in an exhibition as part of the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 curated by the late Harald Szeemann, who had most famously curated the show When Attitudes Become Form way back in the heyday of Conceptual Art proper circa 1969. Being selected for the Venice Biennale would certainly confer a particular significance upon any young emerging artist, but in this case it's as if from that point on Laurette became "officially" a post-conceptual artist. In the Venice exhibition, Laurette was represented by a sculptural twin called The Freebie King, pushing a shopping cart loaded up with his previous bargains. Nearby were assorted bits of documentation recording the specific details of Money Back Shopping. FREE—isn't that the most wonderful word when viewed in the context of our contemporary society? As the bounds tighten further around us in virtual terms, to become free of financial obligations is truly a fantasy, as the term FREE functions in our society most often as merely the bait to draw the potential consumer in to buy some more. Paradoxically, Laurette must expend much work to realize his FREE shopping conceit, and obtains comparatively little in return, excepting wider notoriety. A playful game or twist on a marketing scheme used again and again by corporations becomes instead a job in itself. Laurette's doppelganger recalls the "shopper" icon of conspicuous consumption fashioned by the American sculptor Duane Hanson in the 1970s, and it also reminds one equally of the history of artists who have questioned notions of buying, selling, trading and consumption in general in their works. Artists David Hammons and Martha Rosler have both ingeniously used the mechanism of a sale. Hammons notably explored this territory with his work Blizzard Ball Sale, in which he sold snowballs on the street in Manhattan, a twist on the prevalence of street vendors with their mixed and unmatched goods, often spread out on a makeshift blanket or platform. Hammons equally parodies the artmarket in which the assignment of value appears exceedingly arbitrary. Rosler has mimicked that middle-American weekend pasttime the garage sale in a variety of locations, both nationally and internationally.[6]
SITUATIONS Laurette's work Apparitions (1993-95) consists of recorded clips from the artist's appearances on broadcast television programs as either simply an unidentified member of the audience, or sometimes as a participant in game shows. Thus the artist uses the periphery of vapid televised entertainment as an alternative space, twisting and warping its initial function to make his own game. This set of "appearances"—Laurette plays on the French word also meaning spectres—served as an initial introduction to the artist as in this exchange on a Dating Game-style program: The artist thereby sets up a perfect moment for posterity: I wasn't an artist before but now I am as I played one on TV! The authenticity of Laurette's practice is verified through this medium which trades in inauthenticity each and every second. If the quest of artists was once to blur the boundary between art and life, recently blurring the line between life and television has become much more relevant to Laurette. Intriguingly, as has frequently occurred throughout Laurette's lively recent career, the artist functions as interloper reacting in response to the corporate world, but in turn becomes ever more deeply involved in the high-end art world. Laurette's ventures into this area could be read on one level as critical conceptual art, and simultaneously as a fantastical model of the contemporary consumer "just out to have fun." To some extent, rather than Matthieu Laurette attacking the commercial world, one could regard him as playing a series of art/life games which actively thrive due to their symbiotic relation with the host body of the capitalist system. Certainly many of Laurette's projects display an absurdist playfulness, a puckish desire to wreak havoc on existing systems. However an extension of just this cleverness is the pragmatism of the artist-entrepreneur, fashioning himself as an identifiable, branded quantity even as the bulk of his production involves pointing out absurdities and aporia of the global capitalist era. Laurette commented in a 2001 interview: Laurette emerged as a young artist in the 1990s and in France at that point the most interesting art publications included Documents sur l'Art and Blocnotes. Both discussed artists including Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden featuring extensive profiles and documentation. These two artists became very significant for Laurette, and echoes of their work are evidenced in his practice. Burden literalized the notion of hijack in his early 1970s television pieces, such as TV Hijack in which the artist held a shocked interviewer with a knife poised at her neck. He also bought a few seconds of advertising time during the late night news to screen a brief but highly evocative excerpt from his Through the Night Softly, which featured an almost entirely naked Burden crawling over shards of broken glass. McCarthy had also been constructing his graphic and disturbing actions and performances for some time, in which eating, copulation, violence, and popular culture all merge together, exemplified by works such as Bossy Burger, wherein the masked artist evokes a chaotic cooking program in parodic fashion. The younger artist differs substantively in approach from these particular predecessors, as elements of threat, violence and general calamity are at the core of the 70s artists' works, while Laurette brings a lighter, more user-friendly countenance to the table. Instead of the grotesque and horrific, he invokes the ridiculous and comic. While the "play" of Burden and McCarthy bears resemblance to sado-masochistic games, Laurette is more measured, cool, and whimsical. Laurette does not scare off the spectator, tactically using his charm and likeability. The disjunctions which Laurette mentioned above also recall the Situationist International collective of the 1950s and 1960s helmed by Guy Debord, in which the corresponding term was détournement which can be variously translated (most often as "diversion") but ultimately engages with the same mischievous spirit of subversive intervention. As Debord (with Gil Wolman) wrote in a 1956 article: As Debord consistently argued that there was no such thing as plagiarism, we can only assume he would have had no difficulty with Laurette's video in which passersby on the street were asked to read passages from The Society of the Spectacle. This was a kind of anniversary piece, and to see shoppers on their postmodern strolls be slowed by Debord's agonized indictment of postwar Capitalism was a very novel conceit of Laurette's. The text becomes a new, living entity with undeniably poignant significance when read to the camera in this way. Among the quotes cited from Debord: "The whole life of societies governed by modern production conditions is announced as a huge accumulation of spectacles … All that was directly lived had become mere representation. … In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood."[9] Laurette also has used the media such as newspapers, magazines, and television, both as a promotional tool and the art context itself, in so doing transforming these venues into new fields in which to play. Of course this could also be linked to such prominent and disparate contemporary art forebearers as Andy Warhol, and his various forays outside the studio, Dan Graham and Robert Smithson, and their magazine articles as artworks, or Joseph Kosuth and his conceptual art statements placed as newspaper advertisements. In the series of clips entitled Applause (1998-2000) Laurette is seen as a member of a television audience, enjoying and participating as part of the spectacle, as at the same time the peripheral shots panning the studio become the new focus and center of attention. These clips were then shown on large outdoor information screens in Berlin.
GAMES In January of 2000, Laurette began one of his most outlandish projects: for a Spanish television program, in which the premise is the exchange of goods by a system of multiple swaps, Laurette initated a chain of events by purchasing and putting up for barter a new automobile. As the artist recounted: Laurette was interested in the notion of a "less valuable object becom[ing] an exchange medium to obtain an object that is worth more."[11] In the intervening stages, then a car is magically transformed through the process of exchange into a computer, then a television, then a refrigerator, and so on until the possibilities have exhausted themselves. Whereas artists once worried over arbitrariness of formal decisions dealing with aspects of light and color, now Laurette throws himself into the thicket of televised hyperbole, and instead of an accelerated capitalism in which commodities increase in scope and style, the chain descends into the bowels of kitsch and degradation. The streamlined new car showroom becomes the cast off cacophony of the flea market. My own mind wandered when pondering this work and its spiraling ramifications, and I came up with a curiously parallel example from a 1947 Donald Duck comic book by Carl Barks, entitled Maharajah Donald. In this vintage comic's storyline, after cleaning out their uncle Donald's garage, young Huey, Dewey, and Louie are only given a stub of pencil for their considerable efforts. The entrepreneurial young canards then proceed to trade this paltry item "up" a chain of exchanges which includes a ball of string, a knife, a silver belt buckle, a camera, a pearl, and then ultimately a steamship ticket to India, which Donald quickly confiscates. Several of Laurette's other projects have continued his interest in recording absurdist examples of economic exchange, such as in It is always a Finn that wins!, wherein the artist used the entire budget of his residency project to buy lottery cards, which were then scratched out by four visitors to the exhibition opening. Laurette's use of games is also reminiscent of the games, props, and actions created earlier by Fluxus artists such as Robert Filliou and George Brecht. Filliou, who characteristically titled a 1970 piece I Hate Work Which is Not Play assembled an entire book (in collaboration with Brecht) called Games at the Cedilla, published in 1967 by Dick Higgins' Something Else Press. The volume is an engaging time capsule. A compilation of events, games, jokes, letters, photos, poems, scores, and songs it has somewhat the feel of other countercultural documents of the period, but is insistent upon its intention to push the thoughts of the reader elsewhere into a new, open space. Lightheaded and giddy, the reader may perhaps trip and stumble into perplexity at times, but might just as often often become disarmed and simply laugh. Not a didactic statement of intent or manifesto, Games at the Cedilla acts to collate various bits and pieces, the remnants of their experimental gallery/shop/collaboration—"a free city of the arts, a center of research, of ideas"—operating at Villefranche-sur-Mer in the south of France for 3 years in the late 1960s. Brecht and Filliou’s motto was the following: "La Cédille qui Sourit (The Cedilla that Smiles) permanently creates anything which has or has not already been created."
ENTERTAINMENT The continuing Citizenship Project has involved Matthieu Laurette’s elaborate attempts to become a legal citizen of as many different nations as possible, to a degree becoming a conceptual citizen of the world. When chosen by curator Harald Szeemann to participate in the 2001 Venice Biennale, Szeemann even assisted in this project by co-writing a letter with Laurette addressed to the 111 non-participating countries in his official capacity, stating that in exchange for citizenship, Laurette would represent the country in the following Biennale. Such humor is entirely characteristic of the artist’s work in general. Indeed among the most relevant questions raised by Laurette’s work are: How does an artist critically respond to issues of global capitalism in new and different ways? If so many artists are traveling often, exhibiting internationally, and communicating frequently on the internet, how does this manifest itself in ever-changing attitudes toward artistic practice? Laurette's manner of working equally recalls artist-critic Manny Farber's characterization of termite vs. white elephant art. In Farber's case, he was addressing the cinema and painting around 1962, but perhaps in Laurette's case he is the resourceful postmodern termite artist against the bloat and bombast of, say, America's own pride and joy Matthew Barney. To quote Farber, "the most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement."[12]Farber's termite art is contrasted against art "as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area."[13] Such an instance of termite art in Laurette's case is the Scattered Library piece of the late 1990s, in which the artist proposed to lend a selection of his own books—ninety of them to be exact—to the St. Bruno library in Grenoble, ending up during that period as almost 3/4 of one percent of the library's holdings. Laurette has repeatedly combined performance, concept, and spectacle within his work and one of the most characteristic examples of this is his Déjà vu: Lookalike Convention project, which corrals an assortment of celebrity twins to roam art venues and mirror our cultural obsession with fame. Yet these are counterfeits, and especially so when seen close up. The fakes are rounded up by the faker, and where does the truth lie but in the hands of the trickster artist who reads the problematic aspects of our 21st century media environment, so as to consistently use them as fuel for pragmatic and poetic invention. One might consider such an approach to be a mere assortment of entertaining pranks, but we have created the ideal cultural setting to be twisted and contorted again and again by media-savvy "social sculptors" (to borrow Joseph Beuys' still relevant term) like Laurette.
DIY Despite his near-continuous gallery representation[14], the website he maintains and the funkiness of his Laurette's installations and venue specific works exemplify a post-punk ethos of "Do-It-Yourself" or DIY, an termite-like approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries. In this manner, the singular artist becomes a collective, as he runs the Home Studio. In his recent survey of postpunk, writer Simon Reynolds recounts the Buzzcocks' self-distribution of their 1977 Spiral Scratch EP as a major achievement in launching the DIY aesthetic: This has also become a feature of many of the artists who have been termed "relational" by the curator-critic Nicolas Bourriaud, former co-director (with Jerome Sans) of the Palais de Tokyo Contemporary Art Center in Paris. Such artists as Christine Hill with her Volksboutique, Maurizio Cattelan with the Wrong Gallery, and the Anna Sanders film productions and Ann Lee art projects organized by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno (in collaboration with others) can be associated with this approach. Bourriaud begins his book Relational Aesthetics with the statement "Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence."[16] He defines a relational art as "an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space."[17] Bourriaud continued his theoretical constructs of the current state of post-conceptual art by the adoption of the term "Postproduction" or (in his words): In France a country whose art scenes are conspicuously institution-driven, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris—while under the co-directorship of Bourriaud and Sans—one was more likely to see a nightclub-style DJ party with its attendant atmosphere as a more traditional, refined art exhibition. One might also question how much of an issue it is that Laurette is a French artist—is his manner of working fundamentally different from artists in the rest of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas? Despite his pleas for assistance gaining visas to other countries, and mock protests, he is one of the most peripatetic artists working today, one as I have asserted previously who uses new forms of media, exhibition, and promotion as a revamped site for public art. Bourriaud strenuously tries to play the global card, as when he commented: "I don't think it's possible to have national models anymore. We've tried to shift the problem. For us, Paris is just a city where a lot of interesting people live. It's a meeting place, like New York."[19] Many other artists (who immediately preceded Laurette) working in France are taking a similar approach quite often, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, and Phillipe Parreno. Outside of France you also encounter such artists as Maurizio Cattelan, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija and others who are challenging the boundaries of nationality, media, and "proper" artistic behavior. That said these "name-brands" have become extremely marketable artist-commodities today, and the incorporation of such initially challenging work into the mainstream of the neo-avant garde raises further questions. Of the critics who have taken issue with Bourriaud's relational aesthetic argument, the most prominent is probably Claire Bishop who writes: Bishop is in part taking issue with the specific assumptions geared toward the practice of an artist like Tiravanija, who is known for his emptied out spaces subsequently to be filled up by the activities of the artist in collaboration with viewer-participants. Intriguingly in Laurette's case, the artist works—plays—in the interstitial virtual spaces of the media, inserting his presence into television commercials, banal programming, sign boards, and contests. DIY is an inherently political choice of methodology, although one of the related problematics is that even if an artist adopts this route, it is very likely to transform into something else, particularly if the commercial distribution system can aid in disseminating and marketing the work. Today Laurette is represented by Yvon Lambert, a gallery with significant presence in the international art market. But perhaps it is Laurette's conscious decision to take control of his work steering his way through the crowded field of visual culture via his appearances or apparitions that has the most sustained and consequential artistic impact. Where will this artist be seen next? He is probably there before you realize it, blending Zelig-like into the crowd of enthusiastic travelers to the Today show at Rockefeller Center, waving a handmade posterboard sign emblazoned with the profound statement "GUY DEBORD IS SO COOL." The spectacle is not over and there's evidently no end in sight.[21]
Endnotes [1] Colard, Jean-Max. "Matthieu Laurette: Yvon Lambert." Reviews. Artforum (Summer 2005), 335.
Martin Patrick is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at Illinois State University and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chicago's Department of Visual Arts. His writings on art have appeared in a variety of publications including Afterimage, Art Monthly, Centropa, Frieze, and Third Text. His research interests include conceptual and performance art, photography, and art theory and criticism. He is currently writing a book on contemporary artists who directly address the art/life divide.
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