Pushing All The Right Buttons
Interior, Paris, a darkened room on the sixth floor of semi-derelict office building in a rundown, working-class neighborhood. You are alone, in what is probably Paris's most obscure art gallery, watching an art video by an equally obscure young artist. There is a red button attached to the arm of your chair. On the screen in front of you, a man sits against a stone wall. He is smiling, his eyes are closed, the sun is shining, birdsongs fills the air. Nothing else is happening. A minute later, still nothing. Another long minute. Eventually you press the button. The man's eyes open. You recognize him; he's Mathieu Amalric, winner of this year's best actor César, the French film industry's equivalent of an Oscar. The country's hottest arthouse actor, a favorite of Arnaud Desplechin, André Techiné, Olivier Assayas and Jean-Claude Biette; what the hell is he doing here, on this single screen in this tiny room on the sixth floor of nowhere? And why isn't he doing anything, just sitting there, enjoying the sun again, with that same, loopy, self-contented grin on his face? You press the button. He stands up. He walks into the city. He gets a job. He sits in front of a computer. He types. And types. And types. And types. You press the damn button again.
Welcome to the marvelous, maddening and barely interactive world of Martin Le Chevallier. A maker of small, well-crafted parodies of contemporary culture – a telemarketing phone (Doro Bibloc, 2003) that chirpily seduces its user into giving credit card info and buying expensive works of contemporary art; a video game (Vigilance 1.0, 2001) where players rack up points by squealing on litterbugs, drunks, jaywalkers, drug dealers, paedophiles and adulterers; an interactive CD-ROM (Wager 1.0, 1999) that spews forth screen after screen of self-actualizing nonsense – the 36-year-old Parisian artist is now becoming widely known for his videos. Like Oblomov (2001), a contemporary revisit of Goncharov's famously indecisive layabout in the novel of the same name. In Le Chevallier's version, Oblomov wakes up – but only if someone presses the red button in the wall next to the screen. He will lie face-up in bed, staring at the ceiling until the end of time, unless someone presses the red button again. The viewer is placed somewhere between peep-show voyeur (‘to see more, put in another coin’) and a Milgram experiment ‘teacher’ (‘wrong answer, press the button and give the “learner” a 300-volt shock’). Obomov obviously doesn't want to do anything, and yet there we are again, pushing he poor schmuck's damn button.
Le Chevallier's background is in graphic arts – he still does occasional layout for the Paris newspaper, Liberation – and he's on the cusp of the Playstation generation, but he's no technophile, and not at all interested in giving the viewer any videogame powers beyond that of the gentlest cattle prod: as he puts it, we can't instruct his avatars to ‘ “do this or that” but only to “do something” ’. Anything! Oblomov moves until he finds another excuse to stare off into space, as if, as in the novel, asking and not being able to answer the questions ‘What are days for? Why bother?’ Viewers are then forced to ask themselves, ‘Why bother pushing the button? What's the point?’ And we can't answer these questions either. But push it we do.
Le Chevallier's latest work, the Mathieu Amalric video (The Butterfly, 2005), gives the viewer the same low-volt powers of intervention, only here it's not indolence that we interrupt, but happiness. With the sun-washed look of fable, silent but for ambient sounds and pockets of insipidly sweet-sounding music, it follows Amalric's Buster Keaton-like character on an endless loop of picaresque pursuits, each concluding in seemingly neverending happiness, until we press the button and something disruptive happens – he gets hit by a car, or finds a gun, or sees a naked woman making love. In the last example, the character has become a priest; seeing a beautiful woman riding her partner in the throes of orgasm makes him strip off his robe and start chasing skirt. Other happy-enders ending unhappily include a politician, a terrorist, a suburban house-husband, a vagabond and a powerful watermelon magnate. Each incarnation seems ideally suited to the character, but, alas, after a few seconds of lulling music and twiddling thumbs, bores the hell out of us too. So, push, and off we go again.
Compared to Oblomov and the other videos (Bliss, 2001-2) and Safe Society (2003) included in Le Chevalllier's first solo show at the Galerie Maisonneuve (the aforementioned sixth-floor gallery space in the 20th arrondissement), The Butterfly is a more ambitious work, with a cast of 36 and the slick production values of a wide-release feature film. Produced by Camera Lucida Productions with extensive funding from the French government, it's a big button that will no doubt push Le Chevallier out of his happy artworld loop and into the realm of French cinema: having seen The Butterfly at Galerie Maisonneuve, one producer has already approached Le Chevallier with a feature film project, a faux-documentary about the world of business. Something like The Office, reworked by Aki Kaurismaki? Sounds great, but what about that damn button?
Christopher Mooney, in «Modern Painters», May 2005. P. 48