Dansle monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.             (In German)
Guy Debord
(In a really topsy-turvy world, thetrue is a moment of the false)

Technomads, anti-apparatusesand other imponderabilities.

by Inka Schube.Sprengel MuseumHannover.2002  

Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel is a Frenchman (b. 1961) living in Denmark. Inone of the TV clips that he produces for Danish television he did adescription to camera of what he saw on a walk through Copenhagen. In anoff-camera introduction he says that the city is a free place existingsomewhere between dream and reality, a place where you can do anythingand art is everywhere: we see him looking into a shop window with atoilet bowl in the display, and leaving a church that has been convertedinto an exhibition venue.
He finds art in a central public square as well: the armed forces arearranging a Happening. They are demonstrating their weapons and applyingdummy injuries and wounds to passers-by, the children as well as theadults. The stranger feels he should encourage the local tourist board'sefforts. He lets himself be made up as well - "shooting holes that lookreal" - and passers-by look at him in considerable amazement. ThierryGeoffroy/Colonel realizes that he has become visible to people who arehurrying past: "It looks very real. You can fool everybody." Some ofthe soldiers are amused and come up with some shop-talk about thecalibre used and the severity of the injuries. A bit later, with hismake-up removed again - like a sociologist, he carefully labels andstores away the dummy wound as a sample of reality - he now feels thathe is the "invisible man", reduced to "l'air de Paris". The camerawatches people going through glass doors before him then unintentionallyletting them go so that he bangs into them.
Our performer is now bothered about visibility again: he dresses up ina pink-striped steel helmet, a Second World War exhibit, with "Look atme! Can you see me?" crudely painted on it. Kitted out with this, hesays the same words to passers-by in one of Copenhagen's centralboulevards.
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 manypeople trying avoid him.
Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel's logic means that he has to turn to a "publicservice" again - as he did to the army previously - if he is going to bevisible. This time he uses television. He poses, equipped with aconspicuously ridiculous dummy microphone, with other fans behind areporter who is commenting on a football match live. Here the film goesback to the broadcast TV pictures and cuts them in with the spontaneousscenes 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 shortfilms that Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel has made for the Danish TV stationDR1 since 1999. It has been constantly repeated. Strangers come up tothe artist in the streets of Copenhagen and greet him with quotationsfrom these films.
In art galleries, Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel presents the clip completewith the opening and closing announcements, in other words placing itfirmly in the context of television. He also displays, in a gildedframe, the 9mm dummy wound he took off and kept. It is similar inoutline and graphic structure to wounds in photographs of nuclearexplosions.
There are linguistic and visual references to the work of MarcelDuchamp in this work. Alongside them, Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel succeedshere in particular in demonstrating the 'ontological ambiguity of mediaimages' (Anders) amazingly simply and effectively. He addresses thedifference between event and portrayal, and also the difference betweenfiction and reality. Reality appears as an analogy with its mediaportrayal and vice versa. Sitting in front of the television, the vieweris caught up in an image-rhetorical ellipse that is turning in alldirections. The only truly cathartic outcome is provided by implicitlaughter about the absurdity of the situations the performer creates,which in their turn seem to follow the absurd logic of the found realityconstructs.

"Visibility" is, like the 19 other films, a kind of node in theartist's previous work. Many of the rhizome-like stands of his oeuvrecome together here. Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel's permanent interest intourism themes as a synonym for an approach, however structured, to theOther, the alien, is expressed, and so is his examination of militarythinking and its omnipresence.
'Visibility' also demonstrates the artist's approach, which is alwayssociological. He collects facts, apparently without prejudice, arrangesexperiments and takes 'samples' that he then presents to complement thesemi-documentary material, as 'real objects', as physically tangiblepieces of evidence.

Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel administers an almost unmanageable archive oftext, image and sound documents, crates and cases full of newspapercuttings, tape transcripts, questionnaires, C-prints of his own andother people's photographs, employees' identity cards, printed T-shirts,coats with photographic collages, fake press passes and press picturesof works of art that he has collected along with these. They are foundobjects and products of over 15 years of examining how technicallyproduced images function in the mass media and the possibilities open tothe individual for penetrating, occupying, deciphering andappropriating them. They are what he calls his "oculist witnesses", andthey are also evidence of constant attempts to encourage his fellowhuman beings to deploy their critical potential against theinterpretative power of public images.  In every exhibition,different segments of this archive, always selected according todifferent categories, are tipped against the walls and on to the floorsof each particular space.
But exhibitions are just one of the many contexts the artist operatesin - it could just as well be radio, television, a sports or rockfestival, 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. Heswims against the tide with a child's affective, uncensorious delight indiscovery. He asks obvious questions, using this unpretentious approachto rock the boat in terms of things that are usually taken for granted,presenting these as existentially pretentious and overbearing. He usesthe programmes provided by image evaluation organizations to presentthese 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 ofthe everyday, a tramp in every kind of public communication by image, asquatter in the realms of the property administrators, a guardian on theborder between private and public. You have to fill in a visaapplication if you want to undo the buttons on the coats in his touringexhibitions. Colonel's private pictorial worlds are carefully lookedafter inside them - photographs and texts copied and sewn on to fabric.
The artist's archive seems like an accumulation of media rubbish: asthough shaped by detestation of things that are valuable, whose price isassessed as being too high. But on closer examination, it is possible todetect precious features of what is important to the individual inthese banality dumps. They are produced by a dense network ofintellectual reflection. This is fed by critical discourse about visualevidence and also by the rich resources of sociological study, above allby French authors, of media reality. Marcel Duchamp and Daniel Bureneffortlessly become brothers, and the fathers, Vilem Flusser, PierreBordieu and Jean Baudrillard are somewhere in the background. ThierryGeoffroy/Colonel's work seems to offer a real visual version of HenriLefebvre's concept of space production as a dialectical connectionbetween the results of spatial-material practices based on perception,of mental and ideological interpretations and of emotional andpsychosocial connections and relationships.
In fact the Colonel is self-taught, apart from a few years he spent asa medical student. The anti-authoritarian intellectual freedom thisengenders emerges in the form of social impetus: the artist is lookingfor popularity in the service of communication without hierarchies, thatdoes not seek to create hierarchies. Almost anywhere is the right placefor a disturbance. No context is safe from him, from criticalquestioning. One of his exhibitions on 1996 was called "Placed incontext - thrown out of context": Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel collectsimages, sometimes at enormous speed. He cuts, twists, turns, folds andmoves them, watches how this changes them, sums up, categorizes and thenobserves the categories at work. He feeds the images back into the mediachannels and presents their modifications as mutations of meaning.

But there is one thing that Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel never does, evenin the photographic collections of self-presentations by tourists andimmigrants: he never denounces individuals in his image behaviour. Healways addresses the image-political context the behaviour is rooted in,
So the fact that the artist constantly refers to his own biography, tothe military and colonial surroundings of his early childhood, is lessthe expression of a desire to create artistic and biographical myths asa demonstrative way of taking the work back to individually experiencedhistory.
For example, when Goodie is brought into play. Goodie is a man withouta name whose private picture-archive Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel bought ina flea-market. He is a character who reveals the ambiguity of existence.Here we have the public figure, a man without qualities, a good citizenin the office from nine to five, a husband and family man. And there wehave a human being with his private longings, his individual foibles andpassions that can only be lived out with the camera as "oculistwitness".
When Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel gets Kendo fighters at a rock festival tocompete wearing photographs from both of Goodie's lives on their backs,and when he asks the third group involved to present their personalappearances in a similar way, this is no more and no less than asymbolic struggle between the private and public pictorial status ofindividuality. When he paints blue helmets - or has them painted by theexhibition organizer - on all the soldiers appearing in newspaperpictures, this is a demonstratively symbolic act of poetic and ironicpeace-making. When he includes the attendants in an exhibition (this toois a symbolic social act) and asks them to make aeroplanes out of thenewspaper pictures of the armed forces and military activities every dayand launch them into the exhibition space as "flying humanitarianstrike 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 thetelephone 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 betweenthings and their modes of appearance, and when he does this in the WhiteCube of the museum, then this is no more and no less than a specimencase within the spectrum of social image-practice.