Michèle Sylvander produces images. Her images are sensual in a way, she deals with pleasure.
Michèle Sylvander is an artist who produces images that establish a relationship with pleasure, with its erosion. That may seem easy. It is. But that doesn't mean that the aspirations behind this production are simplistic. Pleasure, one would so much like it to be simple. The proverb evoking the pleasure of simple things is an advertising lure.
It seems that two ideas must be evacuated in order to be able to perceive the specificity of Michèle Sylyander's work-
If she produces images, Michèle Sylvander does not produce the criticism of a culture, of a society saturated with images, with the media. That's not her preoccupation. Cindy Sherman and the "photo theory" movement of the eighties are not models here. I'm not even sure that the cinema is a reference of primary importance within the context of this work.
If she produces images in which she sets herself. Michele Sylvander does not place herself within a generation of artists such as Carole Scheeman, Valie Export, Yoko Ono. That is, with many artists for whom performance, body art, feminism, the dematerialization of the object feed their work. Michele Sylvander doesn't work either performance or deconstruction. Neither does she set herself up against her own work methods or criticize them. Perhaps ignoring them, or even forgetting them would be a more appropriate way of describing a way of working that tends towards defining its own formal vocabulary, whilst forever asking the same questions. Her images don't document an action. They are more concerned with composition,nearly pictorial, with the need to give form to an experience either personal and intimate or generic and ordinary.
It is this contradiction, this tension even, that seems to underlie the work of Michèle Sylvander.
Tension that exists between two projects. One recent : Insomnie (Sleeplessness), a video production. The other continously evolving : Photos souvenirs, not to say family photos. The first is nearly a display, the second a witness or indeed voyeurism. Insomnie shows us a woman in a white leotard. It's a fixed shot. She is lying on the ground- She is in a transparent plastic habitacle which determines her space, her sphere. She seems to be sleeping,unconscious, in her bubble. She moves painfully, as if she's suffering from nightmares. She’s isolated, yet without really being so. The bubble is or transparent plastic, somewhere in between a medical isolation tent and a peep-show. The body language itself is very ambiguous, lustful.
The body reveals itself in parts : thighs, bottom, breasts...The work is made up of two envelopes. The first is the body which seems to want to establish its own autonomy, tries to free itself- The body in movement. Not a rapid or violent movement. A slow, unavoidable movement. A movement of which the skin, as with older people, is the one and only witness. Witness to the moment when tissues slacken, when the surface becomes rough. Witness to the moment when the passing of time is a movement, a mark : "to live is to leave marks". To the question : "How do you kill time ?
Merce" Cunningham one day replied"I don't kill time, time kills me".
The second envelope is the plastic bubble worn out by the sleepless movements. The bubble makes itself into a cel, it shields from the world, from violence, from time. It is this isolating machine comparable to Leibniz' monad ; an impenetrable substance, an autonomous organism separated from the social body. An organism, described by Gilles Deleuze is his commentary on Leibniz as being, "a cell, a sacristy more than an atom : a room without windows or doors, where all actions are internal''.
The sleeplessness is, without doubt, a result of pushing the world to the border, it would then be a matter of reflection as to the positioning of the artist, and the need to be visible, to giveform to their relationship to the exterior, to set the boundaries of this relationship to the world.
The very idea of framing is important for Michele Sylvander's work, in so much as it is the heart other photographic work. Frame the world, cut images, assemble them, deform them.
There is a real obsession with 'seeing' within her work, her own as well as with that of the Other.
In the setting of insomnie the bubble, the cell, if it is architecture, it is a Framework as well. It determines the limits restricting the action ; geographically, physically. psychologically, in the sense that it reminds one of the bubble which, in the televion series The Prisoner, is a hindrance to all escape attempts and forever brings the main protagonist back to a world perfectly programed, without surprise, without incident. A smooth world within which the rule of the game will not tolerate any exceptions or side-stepping. This bubble, this Insomnie, never ceases to evoke an obsession for departure. A departure forever suspended, delayed by or for worlds and the comfort that one invents for oneself. The best of worlds perhaps, cramped without doubt.
This is the world that Michele Sylvander documents. Here it's the photo-souvenirs. Contrary to Insomnie these images are not public. These images might not, I must add, be seen as being part of her work. For years Michele Sylvander has photographed her world on every occasion from the most ordinary, to the most "social", to the most "fashionable". She frames her circle within the obsession of her glance .As a result, hundreds of prints are filed, listed, stored andsent to those interested. Beyond the pleasure or displeasure of receiving images of oneself,these dispatches are terrifying. The shots are merciless, without any concession for thesubject's photographed on the one hand. On the other, they pinpoint, after several successive consignments, the incestuous and enclosed nature of a society. The faces, the places, the gestures multiply themselves, erode themselves-.The faces become masks; the gestures manners. These little envelopes full of images are warnings. They set up a third bubble. Thisone isn't the skin, or made up of transparent plastic. It is the unbearable narrowness of the world and its rituals.
Ultimately, Michele Sylvander's way of working is violent. Not a brutal, noisy violence, but a silent, inescapable violence stretched towards the attempt to give form to the impossibility of accepting the world the way it is. Her work is the refusal to abdicate for the pleasure ofsimplified things ; refusal with the risk of sleepessness
Philippe Vergne
- Directeur of the Dia Art Foundation -
