Dans
le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.
(In German)
Guy Debord
(In a really topsy-turvy world, the
true is a moment of the false)
Technomads, anti-apparatuses
and other imponderabilities.
by Inka Schube.Sprengel Museum
Hannover.2002
Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel is a Frenchman (b. 1961) living in Denmark. In
one of the TV clips that he produces for Danish television he did a
description to camera of what he saw on a walk through Copenhagen. In an
off-camera introduction he says that the city is a free place existing
somewhere between dream and reality, a place where you can do anything
and art is everywhere: we see him looking into a shop window with a
toilet bowl in the display, and leaving a church that has been converted
into an exhibition venue.
He finds art in a central public square as well: the armed forces are
arranging a Happening. They are demonstrating their weapons and applying
dummy injuries and wounds to passers-by, the children as well as the
adults. The stranger feels he should encourage the local tourist board's
efforts. He lets himself be made up as well - "shooting holes that look
real" - and passers-by look at him in considerable amazement. Thierry
Geoffroy/Colonel realizes that he has become visible to people who are
hurrying past: "It looks very real. You can fool everybody." Some of
the soldiers are amused and come up with some shop-talk about the
calibre used and the severity of the injuries. A bit later, with his
make-up removed again - like a sociologist, he carefully labels and
stores away the dummy wound as a sample of reality - he now feels that
he is the "invisible man", reduced to "l'air de Paris". The camera
watches people going through glass doors before him then unintentionally
letting them go so that he bangs into them.
Our performer is now bothered about visibility again: he dresses up in
a pink-striped steel helmet, a Second World War exhibit, with "Look at
me! Can you see me?" crudely painted on it. Kitted out with this, he
says the same words to passers-by in one of Copenhagen's central
boulevards.
No one wants anything to do with him. At best, people grunt a short
"No", turn away, or even run off. The stranger is disturbed by so many
people trying avoid him.
Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel's logic means that he has to turn to a "public
service" again - as he did to the army previously - if he is going to be
visible. This time he uses television. He poses, equipped with a
conspicuously ridiculous dummy microphone, with other fans behind a
reporter who is commenting on a football match live. Here the film goes
back to the broadcast TV pictures and cuts them in with the spontaneous
scenes in the city street. T.G./C. sums up, towards the end of the film,
whose action can only be described in excerpts here: "Pink is Live -
Rose Selavy".
This episode is one of the 'viewers' hits' from the series of 20 short
films that Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel has made for the Danish TV station
DR1 since 1999. It has been constantly repeated. Strangers come up to
the artist in the streets of Copenhagen and greet him with quotations
from these films.
In art galleries, Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel presents the clip complete
with the opening and closing announcements, in other words placing it
firmly in the context of television. He also displays, in a gilded
frame, the 9mm dummy wound he took off and kept. It is similar in
outline and graphic structure to wounds in photographs of nuclear
explosions.
There are linguistic and visual references to the work of Marcel
Duchamp in this work. Alongside them, Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel succeeds
here in particular in demonstrating the 'ontological ambiguity of media
images' (Anders) amazingly simply and effectively. He addresses the
difference between event and portrayal, and also the difference between
fiction and reality. Reality appears as an analogy with its media
portrayal and vice versa. Sitting in front of the television, the viewer
is caught up in an image-rhetorical ellipse that is turning in all
directions. The only truly cathartic outcome is provided by implicit
laughter about the absurdity of the situations the performer creates,
which in their turn seem to follow the absurd logic of the found reality
constructs.
"Visibility" is, like the 19 other films, a kind of node in the
artist's previous work. Many of the rhizome-like stands of his oeuvre
come together here. Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel's permanent interest in
tourism themes as a synonym for an approach, however structured, to the
Other, the alien, is expressed, and so is his examination of military
thinking and its omnipresence.
'Visibility' also demonstrates the artist's approach, which is always
sociological. He collects facts, apparently without prejudice, arranges
experiments and takes 'samples' that he then presents to complement the
semi-documentary material, as 'real objects', as physically tangible
pieces of evidence.
Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel administers an almost unmanageable archive of
text, image and sound documents, crates and cases full of newspaper
cuttings, tape transcripts, questionnaires, C-prints of his own and
other people's photographs, employees' identity cards, printed T-shirts,
coats with photographic collages, fake press passes and press pictures
of works of art that he has collected along with these. They are found
objects and products of over 15 years of examining how technically
produced images function in the mass media and the possibilities open to
the individual for penetrating, occupying, deciphering and
appropriating them. They are what he calls his "oculist witnesses", and
they are also evidence of constant attempts to encourage his fellow
human beings to deploy their critical potential against the
interpretative power of public images. In every exhibition,
different segments of this archive, always selected according to
different categories, are tipped against the walls and on to the floors
of each particular space.
But exhibitions are just one of the many contexts the artist operates
in - it could just as well be radio, television, a sports or rock
festival, a scientific conference, a techno party on a bus or in a club,
or a fashion show.
Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel is a technomad in the world of images. He
swims against the tide with a child's affective, uncensorious delight in
discovery. He asks obvious questions, using this unpretentious approach
to rock the boat in terms of things that are usually taken for granted,
presenting these as existentially pretentious and overbearing. He uses
the programmes provided by image evaluation organizations to present
these very programmes.
Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel holds Duchamp's gaslamp up to the waterfalls,
rivers and ponds of the flood of media images. He is a sociologist of
the everyday, a tramp in every kind of public communication by image, a
squatter in the realms of the property administrators, a guardian on the
border between private and public. You have to fill in a visa
application if you want to undo the buttons on the coats in his touring
exhibitions. Colonel's private pictorial worlds are carefully looked
after inside them - photographs and texts copied and sewn on to fabric.
The artist's archive seems like an accumulation of media rubbish: as
though shaped by detestation of things that are valuable, whose price is
assessed as being too high. But on closer examination, it is possible to
detect precious features of what is important to the individual in
these banality dumps. They are produced by a dense network of
intellectual reflection. This is fed by critical discourse about visual
evidence and also by the rich resources of sociological study, above all
by French authors, of media reality. Marcel Duchamp and Daniel Buren
effortlessly become brothers, and the fathers, Vilem Flusser, Pierre
Bordieu and Jean Baudrillard are somewhere in the background. Thierry
Geoffroy/Colonel's work seems to offer a real visual version of Henri
Lefebvre's concept of space production as a dialectical connection
between the results of spatial-material practices based on perception,
of mental and ideological interpretations and of emotional and
psychosocial connections and relationships.
In fact the Colonel is self-taught, apart from a few years he spent as
a medical student. The anti-authoritarian intellectual freedom this
engenders emerges in the form of social impetus: the artist is looking
for popularity in the service of communication without hierarchies, that
does not seek to create hierarchies. Almost anywhere is the right place
for a disturbance. No context is safe from him, from critical
questioning. One of his exhibitions on 1996 was called "Placed in
context - thrown out of context": Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel collects
images, sometimes at enormous speed. He cuts, twists, turns, folds and
moves them, watches how this changes them, sums up, categorizes and then
observes the categories at work. He feeds the images back into the media
channels and presents their modifications as mutations of meaning.
But there is one thing that Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel never does, even
in the photographic collections of self-presentations by tourists and
immigrants: he never denounces individuals in his image behaviour. He
always addresses the image-political context the behaviour is rooted in,
So the fact that the artist constantly refers to his own biography, to
the military and colonial surroundings of his early childhood, is less
the expression of a desire to create artistic and biographical myths as
a demonstrative way of taking the work back to individually experienced
history.
For example, when Goodie is brought into play. Goodie is a man without
a name whose private picture-archive Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel bought in
a flea-market. He is a character who reveals the ambiguity of existence.
Here we have the public figure, a man without qualities, a good citizen
in the office from nine to five, a husband and family man. And there we
have a human being with his private longings, his individual foibles and
passions that can only be lived out with the camera as "oculist
witness".
When Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel gets Kendo fighters at a rock festival to
compete wearing photographs from both of Goodie's lives on their backs,
and when he asks the third group involved to present their personal
appearances in a similar way, this is no more and no less than a
symbolic struggle between the private and public pictorial status of
individuality. When he paints blue helmets - or has them painted by the
exhibition organizer - on all the soldiers appearing in newspaper
pictures, this is a demonstratively symbolic act of poetic and ironic
peace-making. When he includes the attendants in an exhibition (this too
is a symbolic social act) and asks them to make aeroplanes out of the
newspaper pictures of the armed forces and military activities every day
and launch them into the exhibition space as "flying humanitarian
strike forces", this is an intervention, triggered in the simplest way,
into the indifferent anticipation of history in its mass-media version.
When he offers toilet bowls for sale in free papers and gives the
telephone number of the leading Duchamp expert in these advertisements,
then this - as a symbolic act - is mediation between thing and image,
between reality and fiction.
Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel operates at precisely this interface between
things and their modes of appearance, and when he does this in the White
Cube of the museum, then this is no more and no less than a specimen
case within the spectrum of social image-practice.