Prendre le pouls- excerpts
To the cacophony of sounds from the video works mixing to the shuddering pulse of giant paper cone we gathered in a circle with Marlène Renaud-B. at La Centrale for a unique artist talk for Prendre le pouls, switching it up from French to English with the unconscious ease of habit. Each attendee was given a schematic with key words describing the construction and concepts behind the performative works and we were invited to add elements, interpret and modify this schematic to our liking as Renaud-B. walked us through her process.
A couple of excerpts from the evening:
On the presence or importance of the word “fabrication”:
“C’est à toute les étapes, mais en même temps, c’est le début et c’est la fin, c’est partout. Quand tu performes t’es en train de fabriquer, quand je suis en train de performer, c’est la fabrication conceptuelle.
La fabrication est dans l’idée, dans le materiel [et] dans le faire ; par exemple quand j’utilise des moteurs ou des systèmes je veux que ça soit apparent [et] qu’on sente la fabrication.”
On the wearing the yellow suit:
“When I decided to put a yellow suit and a cone on my head, I didn’t want it to be personalized. I didn’t want the focus to be on whether I was a man or a woman, or any kind of individual, so I can clearly become an instrument or a device or a machine that always repeats the same movements".
“Ensuite de pouvoir moi, devenir un instrument, de mettre un suit jaune qui rappelle, si on regarde dans un plan, une marque dans l’espace - juste un signe - [comme] le bonhomme jaune sur Google Maps, qui réinterprète les lieux, et de voir et entendre autrement les espaces.”
On how Renaud-B. came to chose performance locations:
“At a certain point I was doing the repetitive actions in front of a big modernist sculpture on Île Sainte-Hélène, from that moment I told myself [that] the ultimate thing would be to go inside of a Donald Judd sculpture in Marfa, [Texas] which is for me, as a woman with a sculpture background, represents a supreme, male, white, modernist authority.
So finally I decided to go inside of a Donald Judd in Marfa and while I was there I decided to work on the other important spaces that were also [supporting] the ideas I was working with. [For example] the super iconoclast black Ford Mustang in the middle of the desert with a glare on it, or there’s Spaceport USA [in New Mexico], a launch pad for space shuttles for billionaires.”
On the cone installation:
“I was interested in translating the same [ideas] in different mediums and different ways, asking myself: “How can I take the sound from the street or the sound from the space still [using] the cone but in another way?” By reproducing the cone and reproducing the [performance] movement, but focusing on the sound that the material itself, the paper, was making, it reproduced a sound like a pulse.”
--
By Melanie Garcia
