Mathieu Copeland
The Exhibition of a Film
(p. 4-6)
Considering both the physicality of film and the different textures
of cinema, “The Exhibition of a Film” offers a polyphonic chore-ography. Not envisaged as a structural or structuralist “epic”
film, neither is it a series of sequences following one after another.
Each discrepant layer that constitutes the ensemble opens up
a whole range of fields of action. “The Exhibition of a Film”, an
exhibition for a context, namely a film screened in a cinema and constrained by the properties particular to that social environ-ment, is, at one and the same time, a film exhibited, a film of an exhibition and a filmed exhibition.
“The Exhibition of a Film” is constructed by the reality of the cinema theatre—a generic place—and exploits its modalities:
a screen, spatialized sound, a particular duration, etc. The
exhibition brings together
Isidore Isou's Lettrist cinema and Lemaître's supertemporal frame, along with, among others,
Ben Vautier's frame through which the artist signs a fragmented reality, thus reconstituted, of the world. The filming of bodies—dancers and performers—in the body of an institution—the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where a series of scenes
was filmed—confers a cinematographic materiality to the location of the institution. Within the infra-thin of the paratext that are the scores, the performers embody the works, thus producing a different choreographed exhibition. The works as
a whole exhibit a finite number of possible arrangements,
the dramaturgy for a non-narrative film as written by Tim Etchells.
Situating its reality and materiality brings into question each considered artwork. Is it a work created for a film, or the filmed outcome? To give an account of the exhibition—and thereby create a memory of it—proposes a point of view on the exhibited film, and exhibits the exhibition of a film. The question arises of how to film the work and confer on it a cinematographic dimension. Are we creating a document or filming a document? Or, as
Liam Gillick has put it, is an exhibition documentary or fiction? In this exhibition, the works are indexed to, and by, the screen. They become as many props to a film, while retaining their status of autonomous works. For a film to assert its apparent immateriality raises the question of the re-materialization of the work of art—or, as
Lawrence Weiner reminds us, of a “different simultaneous presentation”. What is the status of the work and how should it be situated both in objective terms and as an object? “The Exhibition of a Film” denies the physical reality of the object whilst creating a conceptual object. As
Pierre Leguillon has put it, we are not in the documentation of a gesture but rather in the fabrication within the images of a particular space for objects specific to that space.
Cinema is traditionally the place to forget oneself, as
Morgan Fisher reminds us, and yet “The Exhibition of a Film” asserts the identity of the spectator. The museum is constructed upon the relatively free choreography of the spectator. Instead, and
Mathieu Copeland
The Exhibition of a Film following Claudia Mesch's analysis, let's consider this social sculpture as a counter-institution. The dark room of the cinema denies spectators both their mobility and their perception of space. On the contrary, “The Exhibition of a Film” invites them
to reject their passivity vis-a-vis the film and assume an active
role in its construction by concentrating their attention on a chosen work, on the confrontation between the different works and by contributing to creating this mental dramaturgy.
“The Exhibition of a Film” is articulated around reprises and leitmotifs, which give the film its rhythm and emphasize the time and the duration of the exhibition. In this unity of place, space and time, the film end credits become the exhibition's labels. Developed as a different kind of materiality, “The Exhibition of a
Film” displays a sensitive architecture and highlights the fact that it could not exist without the artworks that make it be, thus producing an immaterial and lasting object.
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