Bloom Projects: Julien Audebert, Ornament and Crimes

Julien Audebert’s work grows out of an exploration of our visual information systems: text and image. Often an exercise in visual literacy, Audebert’s work investigates the way we “read” and understand what we see. In these works, the artist has abstracted the text of great literary and cinematic works to the point of illegibility, where the shape of the text and space between words become the only readable image. By using such well-studied texts as Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Homer’s The Odyssey, Audebert plays with our notion of meaning and where it lies. Unable to be read, we can glean no meaning from the words. Because we know what the text is however, we assign meaning to the block of indecipherable lettering. Auderbet’s work reminds us that words do not inherently carry meaning, but rather we as individuals do. Audebert does the same with what he terms film-sculptures. Studio is made up of multiple film stills deriving from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope. By taking these stills and laying them over each other, the artist compresses cinematic time. Rather than multiple images in sequence (which produce a moving picture and create narrative in time), multiple images come together to collapse time in one frame. The same amount of information is present in the photo sculpture as in the section of moving film, but now the narrative is condensed. Creating narrative and allegory is a long time pursuit of artists and Audebert draws on that tradition. Filmmakers have the luxury of an extra dimension, time, to develop narrative and meaning. By compressing the film section in to one image the artist has abstracted it and denied it linier progression. Like his text-based works, these film-sculptures function as a reminder that meaning is context-dependant, not inherent. The title for the exhibition Ornament and Crimes comes from the title of an essay by the early twentieth century architect Adolf Loos. In his essay, Loos argues that because styles go in and out of fashion it is not only a waste of time to decorate useful objects, but a crime. His reasoning is that as the decoration goes out of style the object is rendered obsolete, slowing the evolution of our culture. Loos favored the “smooth and precious surfaces” of modern architecture. The exhibition title is ironic, as the four works in the gallery have been relegated to the realm of ornament. All five works in this exhibition—two films, two essays, and one epic poem— reference a “crime”. The Odyssey is about a mortal’s punishment for the crime of forgetting his place in the face of the gods. In Rope, the main character presents the idea that intellectuals are above the law and therefore have the right to murder the common people as an academic exercise. The Clue (bladerunnerblowup) is taken Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, in which biologically-engineered humanoid “replicants” are second-class citizens that can be executed with-out trial. This film-sculpture not only references a crime but is a key piece of evidence in “Blade Runner”. Appropriate to Audebert’s themes, the protagonist in the movie enlarges the photograph past the point of a readable image. However, where there should be only pigment grain the protagonist able to see details. The clue is hidden information mirror on the wall, a picture in a picture like the Jan van Eyck painting it references. Also insightful to this discussion, Benjamin’s essay lays out how mechanical reproduction extends the reach of art-works at the expense of the “aura”. The crime he writes about is the denigration of the original and the artist’s touch (aura) through our techniques mass reproduction. In his overall artistic practice, Audebert not only reproduces works, but reinterprets and re-contextualizes them. In compressing and abstracting the information, making it into ornament, our ability to discover the crimes is abated. Without context, the evidence of the crimes in these works, and his own crime are erased, leaving us with simply with ornament.

Studio