Haven’t we met somewhere before ? by Alexis Vaillant | Matthieu Laurette presents Free Sample Demix (1998)

Global Demix iHome Studio by Matthieu Laurette / texts / 1998 / Free Sample Demix

Vaillant, Alexis. "Haven’t we met somewhere before ?" Essai. in Exh. Cat. Matthieu Laurette présente Free Sample Demix. Paris: Galerie Jousse Seguin, 1998.

read original text in French.

Haven’t we met somewhere before ?
by Alexis Vaillant - Translation S.Pleasance & F. Woods

Strange, I’ve seen that face before...

Appearing / In March 1993, Matthieu Laurette took part in the TV game-show Tournez manège / Merry-go-round and, while on the set, declared himself to be an artist. The fact is that he became an artist by virtue of his own declaration1.
There were several rehearsals before the show was recorded. The broadcast was prepared, and all the candidates were familiar with their questions. Laurette went to take part in the images. That TV game show interested him because he was recorded live, because it was based on a cynical clockwork-like rotation peculiar to being on TV : “Who’s turn?... next please !”, and because there was an insinuation that the game and those playing it were (un)seen in the ebb and flow of TV. The first part of the game was titled “Choisissez-moi” / ”Choose me”. The aim here was to select one out of three guys and one out of two girls by means of a series of questions/answers. Once the three guys had chosen a girl, she then pointed to the guy she liked the look of. Laurette was not chosen, the merry-go-round span, back to life. As far as the audience could see, his involvement in the show stopped right there — back to reality. But those apparently insignificant two minutes when he was inside the TV represented an audiovisual storehouse which he would subsequently (get others to) quote, broadcast, edit, recount, and remix, to the point where all references became blurred and the idea was born where going on TV and declaring 2 yourself to be an artist was the same as becoming visible and being true.

Apparition / That day when Matthieu Laurette took part in Tournez manège, Évelyne Leclerc was doing the introductions and refereeing “Choisissez-moi”. When she asked Laurette what he wanted to be later on in life, he answered laconically: “An artist”. She went on to ask him what medium he worked in... “painting, sculpture...” and it was clear that “multimedia” was the buzz word in this context, because the presenter, who embodied the spirit of TV, reflecting the attentiveness of the audience and fabricating audience ratings, wound things up by saying “nice answer”. Tournez manège and the artist were on.
A few days before 26 March 1993, 200 people received a mailed or faxed invitation to watch Tournez manège. The (TV) broadcast was announced like a one-man show. The invitation gave the time and channel of the “rendez-vous”3. The artist knew that the apparition/appearance also defined what had not yet taken shape, in the sense that you talk about a warning shadow. This is why he did not just send the invitation to people he knew.
An apparition is a visible manifestation of a person or being whose presence cannot be explained by the natural course of things (Larousse). It is perforce short because it involves the act of appearing. It is different from a vision because it presupposes the real existence of the object seen or the person glimpsed.
On 26 March, Matthieu Laurette recorded Tournez manège and thus salvaged the TV material which we would then re-broadcast, first as such, and later edited and incorporated in other sequences showing apparitions/appearances. Tournez manège represented the artist’s first “apparition/appearance” conceived as such. It was also the only one to prompt a simultaneous double reading, about the method of utterance and the way of declaration. It referred to emergence4 and at the same time fostered the trigger for the general system of Apparitions subsequently developed. For this system only really became possible once the signalling of the apparition (identified and thus recognized face, silhouette and voice) operated as such during the broadcast. In other words, once Matthieu Laurette was seen several times. The incorporation, two years later, of a photograph of an audience, taken during a conference in Rennes and published in the February 1991 issue of Beaux-Arts, was regarded as an “appearance/apparition” solely because he had, in the meantime, appeared.
Through his method of consumption (“satisfied or your money back”, “100% money back guaranteed”, “first purchase reimbursed”), Matthieu Laurette has become a topical news item. The more he broadcasts, the more he salvages. Because he broadcasts almost exclusively on mass media and in mass publications (press, Internet, TV, radio), the feedback is sometimes considerable (cf. page one of Le Monde, and the one o’clock and eight p.m. TV news). It is always visual, and can accordingly be used as an apparition, even if the thrust is based on the content.

Appeared / Matthieu Laurette’s Apparitions are thresholds of actual visibility (its imagery), of what it represents (a form of economy), of what it guarantees (an alternative economy), and of what it embodies (an artist). Even if the economic arenas of production and distribution govern the utopian tendency of Apparitions, their subject has to do with our economic system as a whole. But “any lessons they may dispense to the community are fortuitous—due to the fact that they speak first to each individual, as an irreducible singularity 5”. Because the fact of having seen makes the “apparition/appearance” possible. Seeing Matthieu Laurette in the knowledge that he is going to appear, or seeing him by chance, implies that the apparition/appearance is part of a form of perception that is necessarily referred to “something that has appeared”, otherwise put, to a previous appearance, be it televised, photographic or announced. An apparition/appearance does not come, it becomes, in other words it comes afterwards. Because it always comes in second position, it has to do with a second time, appearing for a second time again, appearing only for second times.
The artist’s appearing system thus comes somewhere between appearing and appeared. Because his Apparitions develop a dialectic between the two, the artist urges us to watch out for it. This is the (TV?) syndrome of I’ve seen that face before...6, TV licence or not, at least once.

Towards a dialectics of apparition / appearance / Having walk-on parts in audiences is like having a pitch in sets. Appearing within audiences is like grafting reality on to the small screen. In the form of an aphorism, Karl Krauss observed in 1912 : “The best way for the artist to keep a cool head with the audience is : be there 7.” Laurette’s silent presence in these quick compositions, tracking shots and close ups goes almost unnoticed in TV broadcasting time as well as in actual broadcasting time. His sorties into programme audiences are all the more difficult to see because they are so swift and stealthy, and as such they have to do with apparition. In some instances, the artist positions himself in a strategic spot, downwind, as it were, of the locations, in the middle of the most regular programme schedule. In Le Cercle de Minuit / The Midnight Club, he no longer altogether appeared : he was there.
Once edited, or rather put end-to-end in the chronological sequence in which they went out on the air, these Apparitions adopt the pace of their editing. The brevity and speed of the tracking shots and close ups of audiences provided by the television are offset by the brevity and speed of the editing cut managed by the artist. These images encourage being on the lookout in front of the “set” to detect the presence of the artist in the all around 8 of TV—otherwise put, in the audience. The series of Apparitions put on by the artist in these audiences introduces a certain degree of reality into the images, and because the artist renders them well, the TV pictures can be likened all the more to something ready-made, not to say readymade. By working his way into audiences which, in his own words, have become the “wallpaper” of TV sets, he becomes part of the filling, the better to return it to its own vacuousness. The attempt to humanize a TV set is tantamount to trying to make wallpaper interactive. With Laurette, you can see the contrary, because reality has slipped into the TV, into the set of the “world seen from (the position of) power 9”.
In 1995, Matthieu Laurette loaned some books to the St. Bruno library in Grenoble for a five-year period. About a hundred titles were identified by systematic labelling and classification. This arrangement will be wound up in the year 2000. By thus scattering his books, the artist makes it that much easier to grasp a form of “long distance apparition/appearance”, based on readers’ choices. In the theme-by-theme library classification, there is a heading titled “bibliothèque dispersée” or “scattered library”. Every year it brings out (in-house in an A4 format) an itemized listing of on-the-spot consultations, loans, etc. For the artist this constitutes an exact audience rating which literally itemizes his Apparitions at long distance.
Projection, éliane Soleil, Paris 10.06.98 and Artist’s Studio Spycam extend the library project in a certain way. éliane Soleil, cousin of the late Madame Soleil, has a medium’s gifts which are, likewise, higher than average. In the video consultation which she gives to the artist, in order to predict how his artistic “career” will develop, the camera is static and the field of vision bounded on the left by éliane Soleil’s back and on the right by the artist’s profile. And here the artist borrows the “topos” of the Apparitions, by ironically including it in a set of predictions10 for which the witness-image remains the best intermediary. Whoever watches and listens to this prediction ends up in a time-based logic which puts him/her in an awkward position between prognostications and verifications, at least until the artist reaches “the age of 60, which is when he will retire”.
The “permanent” apparitions, i.e appearances, are only possible because they are conceived in dialectical terms. Artist’s Studio Cam Spy has a counterpart in Projection, éliane Soleil, Paris 10.06.98, as well as its counterpoint. Its counterpart because, after verification, there is the enacted projection of transfers and wagers. Its counterpoint because, by wanting to show the work in progress in the studio by way of a videophone installation via the Internet, it verifies the projection in real time which it embodies live, thus linking verification and projection together. For this reason, Artist’s Studio Cam Spy is perforce activated in the new version (1.0, 1.1, 2.0,... based on the place and the version); it does not need “reactivating”. What is involved here is something akin to live, and really based on the dialectical mechanisms of the potential inherent in the concept of apparition.

A story of systems

As seen on TV / Matthieu Laurette was keen to see inside and not set up a make-believe studio, paint a TV set, or bring out video prints to talk about television by illustrating his subject matter. These things are, incidentally, explored by others, to no avail. Furthermore, we are no longer dealing with forms of logic close to those of the 1970s, which were designed, in their day, to get the artistic into the TV arena, in the double sense of terrain and frame. The way of getting art on to TV 11 in the 1970s shows that the TV space broadcasts art. And presented as such, it remains a space of dissemination that is outside the space or spaces of art. This is a TV-style art. From Gerry Schum’s Fernseh Gallery to Chris Burden’s TV Hijack, an extreme example where the artist takes the female programme presenter hostage and demands that these pictures be broadcast before letting her go, such works show that the challenge has to do, first and foremost, with the actual nature of the broadcasting space. In the age marked by the artist and the work as flows acting on reality, the on-going dilemmas between space of representation and space of presentation 12, video and television 13, seem henceforth aimed at the mnemonic. Those “1970s” came up with their cinema by trying to slip their work on to TV, which was regarded as the predominant method of access. But can you create cinema on TV ? Showing art on TV, in other words on required or squatted channels, is like wanting Arte [the Franco-German TV channel, which broadcasts largely cultural programmes. SP.] in the end of the day. Arte was created 20 years later in the same vein, but art is still not where you think it is. So Arte had to spawn its little girl Metropolis, the theme-based programme that appears on this already theme-based channel. Respecting the channelling to fit into the mould for a while is tantamount to adopting its codes. Whence the foreshadowing violence of Burden’s TV Hijack.
Because his methods of accessing the TV image are the same as those used by TV to access the world, Laurette has turned into the Mister Money-Back of the channels he has passed through.

Channelling, broadcasting / The artist pinpoints, participates, records, edits, broadcasts. The last operation encompasses the four other ones. Laurette uses generic broadcasting channels like TV and the press. Their media are heterogeneous and specific: from TV commercials (Rapido annonce on MCM) to written advertisements in newspapers (Libération, Info annonces, Le 38 annonce, Booking & Free Lance, Troc tout), from TV sets (Tournez manège, Frou-frou, Je passe à la télé, Nonante, J’y crois, j’y crois pas) to set audiences (Le Cercle de Minuit, Français si vous parliez, Vincent à l’heure), from the topical news item (TV news on TF1 and France 2, radio Nova and FG) to press interviews (New Look, L’Itinérant), from pamphlets and menus handed out in the street and at installations (Consommez, c’est remboursé, FNAC, La Folie des produits remboursés, La Villette, le Showroom des produits remboursés, 28 rue Rousselet) to the broadcasting of this method in the Paris Metro system.
The methods he uses are not his own, but they become his by virtue of the way he broadcasts them. Matthieu Laurette is turning into the telegenic media kid, shown again and again by the networks, a kind of “king of the reply coupon 14”. The press is turning him and his way of life into the social symptom of a “period in crisis”. Turned into a society subject, he is prompting the television admiration peculiar to “It works!”. From the word go, Matthieu Laurette has been using his method of consumption to salvage and recycle images and introduce an alternative economy that attempts to be included in the existing channels, so that the information gets across and so that the images may be re-used.
Far from “think money-back, think Laurette!”, he has hewn out a place for himself in the shadowy area of the market system, the media and the dissemination of information, establishing a time for himself in their machinery. As Jack Smith observed back in the 1950s, if “no one ever talks about the problems of daily life, it becomes exotic”15 and by publicizing it in the media, it becomes more remote. As an epiphenomenon of an alternative economy, Laurette’s type of consumption has worked its way into the media and, from the lofty perch of its exemplary character, has been placed in the hot seat of media pomp. The way Laurette introduces and develops this method in the domain of the media and the way he bounces it off his own work points to a critical lucidity with regard to sub-cultures, which can be traced back to the lucidity of Dick Hebdige. According to this latter, “the way in which subcultures are represented in the media makes them more and less exotic than they actually are 16”.

From shopping to showroom / As a result of professional distortion, Laurette often crops up in supermarkets. But it is from his own home that he manages his four bank accounts, inventories his stock, computerizes his contacts, and files each and every product. Buying and consuming are buzz words. It is, moreover, solely on this basis that he gets his money back, in the knowledge that you still need a basic investment to make it possible to then exploit the system—an investment which is then redeemed for sure.
From Nourrissez un artiste pour 100 francs / Feed an Artist for 100 francs in Ghislain Molet-Viéville’s apartment, to the Showroom des produits remboursés / Showroom of Money-back Products at Rue Rousselet in Paris, the artist shows that if any product can be sold, it is above all because it can be bought. In economic terms, launching a current consumer item by the lure of reimbursement helps to sound out, in quantitative terms, the relationships between stock flow and reimbursement applications. The artist keeps this economic machine on the go by going shopping with his own money and the money of people keen to see written on their account statement the signs of a job of work which is turned into a kind of “food welfare”17. Matthieu Laurette himself handles the advertising for this monetary traffic placed under the aegis of Ghislain Mollet-Viéville by making the wish of being “reimbursed by the biggest brands” come true for everyone.
Buying products, displaying them for three days on tables in a garage in the 7th arrondissement in Paris, selling them with their till ticket so that reimbursement is possible, all this is tantamount to controlling the movement of the product in the distribution arena. As signs of the times, shopping bags are becoming free of charge once more, and now they are filled. Look or consume? This is the question raised by the showroom, a question that was reactivated a year later by the Utrecht lottery where the “everything to go” syndrome peculiar to the lottery system introduced by the artist takes the place of the promotional “everything must go” of closing-down sales, large and small alike. The gradual award of prize lots to winners represents the dismantling of the show in the form of a reverse restocking.

Mobile systems / With Laurette, imagery and alternative economy both outline spaces that are not tautological in relation to the fields they use to infiltrate. The image is not saying it is one of these. The alternative economy is used to remain, above all, a personal economy. Matthieu Laurette adopts the same mechanical and methodological principles as those which he takes over. The Vivons remboursés/Money-back life truck borrows the codes of the market display-truck, its participation in Pierre Huyghe’s Mobil TV is included in the established television codes. The Showroom has not been repainted, but left swimming-pool blue, the way the artist Koo Jong-A had wanted it, before Laurette set up shop in it. These spaces no longer operate like exhibition areas but concern them directly. The source of their matrix stems from the circularity and recycling of self-managed economic practices. Their scope is political.
The moveable nature of the systems manages, for its part, to invalidate discourses which tend either to focus on the individual, his methods, his work and his “(de)production”, or render them partial. The general press has clung on to one type of consumption the better to dream thereby of a new economy. The most demagogic press has described the character under the sign of a “fin de siècle resourcefulness”, showing once again that for the media, the minorities are only perceived through the eyes of the majority, in other words, their own eyes, or otherwise put, nobody’s. The artist regards the art press solely as a possible medium for apparitions/appearances, because the organs of distribution informing it are involved in “the very communication of the managerial art of apparition/appearance in the primary sense of the term 18”. This is an additional code. Matthieu Laurette only appears in these media as an artist and in the same way as the others. Because his work represents and is representative of the critical—and critic’s—discourse, But seeing Laurette’s work solely in terms of strategies, even linguistic ones, media infiltration, disturbances, insertions, interferences and contaminations (how else are we to believe in minor revolutions ?), reveals above all the nature of fantasies transferred on to this kind of system. “Infiltrating the media and taking oneself for a virus is more or less as idiotic as thinking that there is a conspiracy to cover up Eddie Barclay’s death19”.

From broadcasting to the live programme —a media issue

Artistic matter / The artist does not regard himself as a “virus”. Rather, he considers himself the practical matter and material of his work. Between a form of disillusioned egocentricity and the fact of considering yourself like the necessary intermediary of the work, there is the gulf of historical references peculiar to the academic history of the representation of the artist. What art history has called the self-portrait, to do with remaining in the pleonasm of representation. If we exclude what an outside eye grafts on to the artist at work — Namuth’s photographs of Pollock for example — , representations of the artist at work are relatively rare. With Laurette, we might talk rather of a portrait of the artist as an artist, in other words, a portrait of the work of the artist at work. This no longer has to do with any portrait as such but with a work where “Matthieu Laurette” embodies the artistic matter — and Artist’s Studio Spycam provides the best example of this. Bye bye, body art...
Taking oneself as work material without shifting towards what psychoanalysis calls “work on oneself”, and at the same time expressing it with regard to the impulses of the mechanisms of the apparition/appearance, calls to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s intrusions in some of his films.
By working his way into his films 20 and not acting in them, Hitchcock insinuates that the intrusion remains a personal thing. For a brief moment, his discreet (apparition-like) appearances fill the off-screen (where he is all the time) within the field. We see him leaving a shop with two dogs at the start of The Birds, getting into a bus in North by Northwest, as a shadow puppet in I Confess, from behind and face on in a hotel corridor at the start of Marnie... These stills give a different showing of “Hitchcock presents”. At the end of North by Northwest (1959), Thornhill (Cary Grant) is anxious to find Eve (Eva Marie Saint). He knows she is trapped in a house standing on the heights of Mount Rushmore and sets about rescuing her. He gets into the house through an open first-floor window, but as he moves from one bedroom to the next, the housekeeper crossing the groundfloor living-room at the same moment sees him on the TV screen and triggers the chase. This is a betrayal by image. Hitchcock edits it by making Thornhill appear and disappear on the TV screen. The TV is switched off so that we can see the scene, but above all because we’re at the movies. It is with cinematic methods that Hitchcock asks the television what it can show and see, and not the other way round. So, in 1959, the cinema thus partly settles its clashes between fictional and realistic diegesis on film and on TV. The TV has not really experienced this problem of diegesis, because it is itself the place from which people speak, in other words, the actual channel of its dissemination which underwrites it as a place of power. The distinctive feature of the TV “guest star system” overlaps in its own way with the apparition issue in Laurette’s work. Warhol’s invitation to an episode of La Croisière s’amuse /Love Boat was in this sense revealing because the artist was invited to reveal other thresholds of visibility of himself (his imagery), of what he represents (an image), and of what he guarantees (a success). “Who cares about television images 21?”

The lights are down, the film has begun / There is nothing surprising about the fact that the satellite network La Chaîne spectacle/The Show Channel is keen to put on its “May 98” revival, against a backdrop of general televised commemoration. Offering Matthieu Laurette an area of reportage is, in this context, tantamount to trying to include, by way of television, one image within another, trying to make the “apparition” all the more diffuse as it is incorporated. Laurette is clearly aware of these little media challenges, informed by the promise of an easy world (“yes, you can consume free of charge!”), and he chooses the Champs-Elysées as a set and shoots with the wherewithal of the channel. He stops passers-by and suggests that they read excerpts from La Société du spectacle [by Guy Debord. SP], which he writes down and then gradually erases as they are read and recorded. So that the readers look as if they are talking into the camera, Laurette holds the white board just beside the cameraman.
The reading starts with the first sentence of Debord’s book : “The whole life of societies governed by modern production conditions is announced as a huge accumulation of spectacles.” This is a distortion 22 of the opening sentence of Marx’s Das Kapital : Debord replaces Marx’s “goods” by “spectacles”. The problematic field raised by this quotation today seems to be operative in specific conditions 23, which under-interpret them 24. Matthieu Laurette does not read the sentences himself. He thus handles the effect that they may produce, transformed into images by strangers and subsequently incorporated in the spectacle, whose limits they theorized over in 1967. Hearing these sentences on TV and seeing them read by passers-by makes them ridiculous. Pierre-André Boutang was probably right : reading and theory come across better against the marine or rustic background of Océaniques. The extent of this gap calls to mind a letter dated 23 September 1983, which Yves Mourousi wrote to François Mitterand to offer him some advice about his attitude towards television : “Be turned on without being demagogic. Make sure that the discourse uttered is not out of synch with the instrument transmitting it. Allow this instrument to be an opening on to the future, dreams and the imagination, but without doing away with everyday preoccupations. You are no stranger to such ideas [...]”. The answer to this letter was written on 30 September : “I have read your letter with much interest. It focuses very precisely on the relationships between television and the new cultural trends of our period 25”.
For strategic reasons, Debord camouflaged the perforce fragmentary quotational scope of his work, itself included within the methodological horizon of Walter Benjamin’s programme to write a work made up solely of quotations. The Benjamin project, which got under way with Paris, Capitale du XIXe siècle / Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, was made considerable use of by Debord as the principle that structured La société du spectacle. Getting passers-by and tourists to read excerpts from the book on this “total” avenue-of-avenues is like making light, between geography and theory, snap phrases / snapshots and references, of a sort of internationalism of ideas on a backcloth of multinational displays. It is tantamount to insinuating that, these days, a stranger will no longer offer you flowers in the street, but rather some of Debord’s words to read, like the snapshot (and snap phrase) reproduced on the postcard, be it chosen or received (in contrast with those that are collected). Laurette ironically short-circuits what is vainest about the memory of 1968 in its light version. And at the same time, he focuses on the contemporary gap between the “disseminated spectacle” and the edited dissemination of the Debord spectacle, which is the same as saying that the world is still making light of such things. Point taken. Sequences / cut, locations / dissemination, reading / re-reading, centring / off-screen, context/set, the artist has become “imperceptible 26” through the separations he creates here between memory and de-activated quotation.
Using the “spectacle” as frame and secondary matter is to link up with Ulysses and Michelangelo in Godard’s Les Carabiniers. Ulysses and Michelangelo, two gullible peasant brothers with aptly chosen names, are sent off to war on the orders of the King, with the promise—turned certainty—of visiting foreign lands, and the possibility of taking everything they need with impunity : locomotives, elephants, pens, Alfa Roméos, Hawaïan guitars... and permission to smash old men’s glasses and children’s arms... When they return to their fallow land, they find Venus and Cleopatra, respectively mother and daughter, who had asked them to bring back “bikinis!”. They bring them back two suitcases full of postcards of the sites they have seen: the Chicago aquarium, the Temple of Angkor, the Arctic Ocean, the Bay of Naples, the Parthenon, the Leaning Tower of Pisa,... of the stars they have rubbed shoulders with, and animals they have slaughtered... so many snapshots which all say that “a moment arrives when things stop being a pure spectacle 27”, not because they become serious, but because a page is really being turned, and because “knowledge of them proceeds via memories of them 28”.

There’s only one seat left on a foldaway chair behind a pillar

Demix system, samples vs. fragments /
The d-mix or demix is a process that works, ideally, in the opposite sense of the mix, and is only accessible as such in so far as it remains connected to it. Free sample is not just a sitcom being currently aired on CBS in Los Angeles; it is, on the one hand, what you can read on samples alongside “Not for sale” notices. In a word, it is what is implied in any sample worthy of the name, minus the free-of-charge element, perhaps. The sample represents on a small scale, but it is not a fragment. It thus links up with the idea whereby the mix (the “presentation” for the artist) brings together samples of one or more items and disseminates a non-remixed version of what it presents. The demix shifts the space and time of the mix. It works on the basis of the mix. The demix is a mechanism, demixing is an operation. This is why the demix can only be grasped as such by the artist, while the onlooker is included in the mix, the listener in the remix, and the reader in the demixing. Free sample is a concertina-like process. Historically speaking, the connections of the part to the whole trace the dialectical limits of an idealistic form of thought : from the Scholastics to the Romantics of Iéna, from Giulio Camillo’s theater of memory to Diderot’s encyclopaedic project, from the site to the non-site, from macro-analysis to micro-history, in particular. In Laurette’s case, these relationships refer above all to the musical sample 29. According to him, “demixing is analysing by different voices (and ways)”. Any musical sample works like a sample and less like a fragment. Treading the path of the demix is like recognizing that demixing produces a kind of mix that is illustrated by the
subjects (meditations, photographs, criticisms).
Matthieu Laurette asked Hugues Royer to record the thoughts of certain people who have helped to lend visibility to Laurette’s work, the aim being to bring to notice various comprehensive notes made up of memories and “true stories”. In his persuasion that the minor tale of locations and the tale of the exhibitions contain one of the threads of “production”, he prepared a questionnaire and asked the biographer of Michel Sardou, Francis Cabrel, France Gall and Michel Berger, himself the “autobiographer” of Madame Soleil, scriptwriter for certain AB productions, journalist and novelist, to meet each one of them in order to collect their thoughts and transcribe them. Hugues Royer interacts, showing his “ghostwriter’s” credentials, with what each person felt like talking about. The demix is also the desire to bring together different, fragmented approaches. One exception to this series, Jean Brolly, a private collector who preferred to rewrite Hugues Royer’s version, slipping in turn into a movement that the artist wanted to be open from the start, even if, for practical and theoretical reasons, he remains both instigator and producer.

Sculpting a bronze in five minutes and signing a brick by mail / In 1996 Matthieu Laurette arrived pushing a trolley on the set of Je passe à la télé / I’m on TV. Valérie Mairesse introduced him as a sculptor, which he approved with a knowing glance at the trolley. While he explained his methods, the studio audience, with built-in ratings, voted for or against him. Laurette caught their attention, the percentage did not budge, and Laurette stayed on the set. As the day’s winner, he left with a medal produced by the Paris Mint, delivered on its plastic mount and engraved, logo-like, with the name of the programme in phoney handwriting : a TV screen showing “I’m on TV”.
Once fitted into the walls of the new wing of the Boymans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the Matthieu Laurette brick will be part of the museum walls because it will have quite literally adopted the mechanics of its inclusion. Involved here were two intentional interplays on sculpture and its forms of existence — the reward by the publicization of methods and the visibility brought on by a circulation of public money.

Laurette is in good form / All the ways of accessing Laurette’s work involve moving around, turning around, getting up, in a word, not staying behind a pillar that gets a bit too much in the way. The multiple-input projects are not formalized by an absence of output, in other words, they are not fatally frozen in a stable formation. Laurette’s systems have to do with recycling and de-production, well removed from any established programme, any thematic structuring, and any illustration.
In his own words, “the commentary on each apparition is implicitly contained in its form”, which links up with a feeling expressed by Richard Hamilton, whereby “social comment is left to TV and comic strip 30”. Even though Matthieu Laurette does not work directly on the social arena, he is not an artist with a system or approach, rather one with a method. Through the Apparitions, he is keen to establish a typology of ways of appearing and the media on which it appears. By editing them, in other words by arranging the selected sequences one after the other, he highlights the process that they adopt and the form used, which they assume to the point of demonstrating that “giving a form to mechanisms is to take these mechanisms as form 31”. Laurette works out forms on the basis of the codes of the media he uses. Whatever the medium may be (from the general to the specific), the strategy he develops live reveals a process specific to the work. This process is itself contained within the specific features of the medium borrowed, which, in turn, leads to the emergence of a form. This form manages to conserve the phases of its manufacture because it has incorporated them. With Laurette, the “form” is thus contained between the phases and their tie-up
(cf. Apparitions (selection) 1995-98) ; it comes somewhere between best-of, compilation and brand new (The Press-Book of Money-back Products). It is their evolution as form 32 which is in each instance renewed and not their formalization, which prompts a proposition supplementary to the artistic dilemmas between piece and trace.

Stock and reserve, the photo is in the filing cabinet / Piece and trace, two dilemmas are all the more complex in so much as the photograph binds the two together. It is for this reason that Matthieu Laurette has developed the communicating structure of reserve and stock. In so doing, he has avoided everything brought on by the laws of proximity and intimacy about the photographic subject of the 1990s. His reserve may be consulted by request and his stock feeds the press with “visuals”. This relationship to the photograph also structures the demix, the arrangement and layout of the images are part and parcel of the same story. This methodological demix unravels, separates and undoes what the artist has done by playing with the way in which he has done it. Slides (views of exhibitions, installations ...) are reproduced in facsimile, and lifesize. The paper documents (pamphlets, appearances in newspapers) are in particular reproduced in full-page format. TV and computer “screen savings” take another style of work dissemination into consideration. Images reproduced from slides play the part of textual illustrations. Implicitly, the artist conceives the way his photographs circulate in the demix.
At the Ici et maintenant / Here and Now show, Matthieu Laurette installed La Folie des produits remboursés / The Folly of Money-Back Products in a Folly built by the architect Tschumi at La Villette, at some remove from the exhibition proper. This space, which became part-stand, part-exhibition area, part-pamphlet distributor, was open by day and accessible by night, because its windows remained lit up and a TV continued to broadcast the Apparitions on this theme. Matthieu Laurette chose photographs from his stock which he enlarged by photocopier. A few months later, at the Here and Now show (again) in the Deposit and Consignment Office, Laurette showed his exhibition by way of an overhead projector reimbursed within two weeks, which he changed twice in two different FNAC stores during the exhibition. Using 48 slides, the artist introduced his first retrospective photographic system which the onlooker could advance at whatever speed he liked.
In the style of the disseminated photograph, he wanted to make a composite model of the distribution of the image. He subsequently met an ex-booker from Catherine Arley, responsible for the composites of the model agency during the 1970s. He entrusted her with the choice of photographs. The composite gives the measurements and telephone number of the artiste and this one quickly did the rounds. The object is now in drawers in art centres, booking agencies and modelling agencies, and in plenty of communications bins too, because the telephone number has been changed, in contravention of the codes of this market.
If the name is doing the rounds, not many of Laurette’s pieces have been seen. And, by an odd coincidence, the artist is showing Free sample demix, a demixing operation aimed at considering the narrative as making up forms of his work in touch with the indirect word as much as with the word of the remix and the tests. He has just recently learnt from Walter Léwino’s test 33 that “it’s not because you’re no Leonardo da Vinci or Marcel Duchamp that you don’t have an artistic sensibility”. In the questionnaire, the artist got 11F.

1. “Art does not exist, it declares itself”, Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object, Chicago and London : The University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 18.
2. In another way Marcel Broodthaers had also declared his intentions in 1964, before appearing. It was in the art world, on his exhibition invitation at the Galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels : “I have also been wondering wether I couldn’t sale something and make a success out of my life.”, in cat. Marcel Broodthaers, Paris : RMN, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1991, pp. 56-57.
3. Echoing the already processual statements of Marcel Duchamp “So the important thing is this clockwork, this snapshot, like a speech given to mark any old occasion but at such and such a time. It is a kind of rendez-vous. Spontaneously writing that date, time, minute (...) as information.”, Marcel Duchamp, “La Boîte Verte”, in Michel Sanouillet (ed.), The Salt Seller, New York : Oxford University Press, 1973.
4. “The emanent object is an apparition”, Marcel Duchamp, “à l’infinitif”, Ibid.
5. Frank Perrin, “Utopia : First Person Plural”, in Blocnotes, Autumn 1993, pp. 116-118.
6. Grace Jones, “I’ve seen that face before”, in Dance Collection, Island records, 1985.
7. Karl Kraus, Pro domo et mundo 1912, Paris : Champ libre, 1985, p. 91.
8. éric Troncy, “Painting from all-over to all around», in Flash Art International, January-February 1994, pp. 78-80.
9. Serge Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à main, Lyons : Aléas, 1991.
10. Alfred Hitchcock, “Would you like to know your future ?”, in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), New York : Faber and Faber, 1995, p.138. “Would you like to be able to predict the future ? A movie director can, you know. In making a film, he takes an imitation slice of life in his hands and arranges it just the way he wants it. He knows, in the first scene, just what is going to happen in the last.”
11. Jean-Christophe Royoux, “D’une boucle à l’autre : activité artistique, post-cinéma et télévision”, in Journal de l’Institut français de Bilbao, April 1998, p. 54.
12. Nicolas Bourriaud, “Pierre Joseph and the adventure of exhibiting”, in cat. Pierre Joseph, Living Reactivable Characters, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Le Parvis, FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon, 1995, pp. 65-68. The author reminds us that since the readymade, the conceptual linkage between representation/presentation no longer grasps very much at all in terms of reality, and ends up quoting Godard : “to represent is to add symbolic value to reality. Otherwise put, it is to legitimize the existing value system instead of presenting it as it is and doing something about it.”, p. 54.
13. Vito Acconci, “Video works 1970-1978”, in Afterimage, Vol. XII, November 1984, p. 15, interview quoted by Jean-Christophe Royoux, op. cit., p. 55, maintains that he has “never managed to clarify the difference between video et television”. According to Laurette, it is the same medium, TV being to do with broadcasting and video being a medium, or even a method of broadcasting.
14. Julien Coubet, Sans aucun doute, TF1, 21 March 1997.
15. Quoted by Timothy Martin, “Janitor in a Drum : Excerpts from a Performance History”, in cat. Mike Kelley, Catholic Tastes, New York : Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993, p. 68.
16. Dick Hebdige, Subculture, The Meaning of Style, London : Routledge, 1979, p. 97.
17. Clarisse Hahn, “Suivre le système à la lettre”, in Omnibus, July 1996, p. 19.
18. “Questions pour un champion”, Interview with the artist, in Casco issue 5, Utrecht : Winter 1998 (forthcoming).
19. “Ne travaillez jamais !”, interview by Jean-Emmanuel Dubois with Ariel Wizman, in Crash, June-July 1998, p. 58.
20. Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film, Paris : Calmman-Lévy, 1995, p. 280.
21. Andy Warhol, “Interview with Gene Swanson”, Art News, New York, November 1963. Reprinted in Charles Harisson and Paul Wood (eds.), Oxford and Cambridge, Blackwell, 1992, p. 733.
22. Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, Pescara : Edizioni Tracce, 1993.
23. In the same vein, the projection of Gordon Matta-Clark’s film Conical Intersect (1975) by Pierre Huyghe, 21 years later, contains similar shifts. They go beyond post-appropriation and reactivation. Considering a finished product (completed and, de facto, old) turning into raw matter is the same as considering any system of (re)activation as the paradoxical pledge of its own de-activation. This in turn makes Pierre Huyghe’s desire “not to add anything to the world” as lucid as it is critical.
24. Richard Shusterman, Sous l’interprétation, Combas : L’éclat, 1994.
25. These letters are quoted in Jacques Attali, Verbatim I, Paris : Livre de poche, respectively p. 767 and p. 774. Their juxtaposition is due to Gérard Guégan, “Les Vivants sont ceux qui luttent la haine de classe au cœur”, in Cahiers des futurs, February 1996, p. 24.
26. Gilles Deleuze, “Le plus grand film irlandais (Film de Beckett) ”, in Critique et clinique, Paris : Minuit, 1993, p. 36.
27. A Jean-Luc Godard saying reproduced on an Allen Ruppesberg poster, 1989.
28. “Questions pour un champion”, Ibid.
29. The (bad) rapper Puff Daddy declares on MTV that he “uses samples so that people will remember the original song”, whereas at no time in its history has the sample claimed to be a vehicule of melancholy. David Toop, the rap historian, further relates that “Kool dj Herc inserts the Doobie Brothers and the Isley Brothers ; Grandmaster Flash overlays the words of records and sound effects with The Last Poets ; Symphonic B Boys Mixx cuts classical music on five different tracks” (the italics are mine), The Rap Attack : African Jive to New York Hip Hop, Boston : Boston South End Press, 1984, p. 105.
30. Richard Hamilton, “For the Finest Art, Try Pop”, in Collected Words, 1953-1982, London : Thames & Hudson, 1982.
31. “Questions pour un champion”, op. cit.
32. Bernard Edelman, “Propriété littéraire et artistique / œuvre protégée / Exposition permanente du cinéma / Musée du cinéma”, in Recueil Dalloz, Paris, 1998, p. 314, refers to the content of the Schlumpf ruling. “In this decision, the Court of Paris has denied that a collection of old cars had the quality of a work - replacing it with the qualification of a “work of man” - on the essential grounds that “the nature of the work of art is that it involves no manipulation or modification following its creation”, which, with regards to the set-up of the Cinema Museum and to the specific aspects of this notion of “form”, raises a whole raft of issues. Furthermore, according to Bernard Edelman, “Only form will make the idea tangible for, inevitably, the law works on the basis of proof.”, in cat. Feux pâles, Bordeaux : capcMusée, 1991, p. 149.
33. “Quel artiste êtes-vous ?”, the Walter Léwino test, in Beaux-Arts magazine, August 1998. Results p. 30.

(c) 1998 - 2004 - Matthieu Laurette & Alexis Vaillant
Free Sample Demix. Artist publication. Paris: Galerie Jousse Seguin, 1998 - ISBN 2-909187-06-3