People in the Image/People before the Image: Address and the Issue of Community in Sylvie Blocher's "L'annonce amoureuse"

Abstract

It is easier to perceive endings than beginnings, especially when dates and ideologies conspire to impose consensus on those of us in the know. At the end of this century--of this millennium, even-all you hear about is ends: of art, aesthetics, modernity, politics, even (this is the best) the end of ideology. All it takes to see the end of things is to be au courant and blase, but to spot beginnings one must be open and naive. The French sculptor Sylvie Blocher has the naivete of an artist who sets off a beginning; her work demands a theory of commensurate naivete. This is hard to do but we must try. In late 1994, after having worked in sculpture and installation work for almost fifteen years-a career that started in 1980 with Le parloir and reached a new threshold in 1991 with Dteue la Mariee se rhabilla, two works significantly negotiating her critical passage to the post-Duchamp era-Blocher took up the project of a series of video works to which she gave the generic title Living Pictures, and gave herself the following motto: rendre la parole aux images, to give images back their speech. The project contains seven works to date: L'annonce amoureuse; A quel point puis-je tefaire confiance ?/How Much Can I Trust You?; Entre tu y yo estramos nosostros; Histoire de ma vie, histoire de ma pipe; Warum ist Barbie blond?; Gens de Calais; and Tell Me, recently shown at the reopening exhibition of P.S. 1 in New York City. No doubt she knew that video was equipped with a soundtrack: to give images back their speech is not the same as making images speak. No doubt she also knew that giving images back their speech doesn't really mean a thing. What means something is giving people back their speech, making sure that the people in the images speak to the people before the images. Hence the radical naivete of the question raised by these works: Is it within the power of art to give people back their speech? Who among today's artists, I ask you, dares to be so candidly political?