Gilles Barbier
Have you ever read texts about an artist and felt stumped by how your experience of their work didn’t square with what you read? Consequently, did you feel at a loss, or a bit stupid, as if your impressions were nothing but lies? Or did you trust your instincts and think (with all due respect) that everyone else might be full of shit? How long did you sit on the fence?
I straddled it for a while after seeing Gilles Barbier’s brilliant solo survey show. I felt as mortified as the tarred-and-feathered clone of the artist, Le pied tendre (Tenderfoot, 1994), which sat outside the gallery entrance, slumped astride a rusty rail, sullying Sir Norman Foster’s pristine space. Then I realized the problem boils down to a sense of humour; as soon as you have to explain the punch-line of a joke, it falls flat. Barbier’s work is very funny – darkly so – and impressively erudite. However, the gravity of discourse around it can be as deflating as a whoopee cushion collapsing under a large bum.
The exhibition opens with a room panelled with framed pages of drawings, handwritten texts, schema, maps and images, patched together into a single, all-over image like pieces of a puzzle. It’s tempting to see each as the single frame of a comic strip, a medium that Barbier affectionately cites in his graphic style and in his ubiquitous use of the speech bubble. He sees these bubbles as ‘vacancies in representation’, since they open up spaces in which all sorts of fictions can take hold and bleed into one another. Each page is individually titled, and there is no contained, coherent narrative here. Rather, the viewer is confronted with a profusion of fictional fragments rich with references to Barbier’s own drawn inventions (an Oneiric Vaseline Factory, a Word Cemetery and a Ministry of Goose Bumps), as well as to Kafka, Mickey Mouse and nuclear fusion. Digressions, repetitions and cross-references to past production and future works can be teased out of these pages, but they never gel into a structure.
More systematic were the seven-foot-high ink and gouache copies of pages Barbier made from the 1966 Larousse Illustrated Compact Dictionary. Purportedly working on Sundays, a day ‘devoted to non-artistic activity’, he hand-copied the definitions and illustrations; then, in order to avoid crossings out on the larger pages, he painstakingly wrote out his errata on smaller separate sheets. There Barbier’s narrative talent materializes as the copier’s voice, soliciting the reader’s goodwill and obsequiously apologizing for any confusion caused by each noted mistake.
Barbier’s interest in slippages between copies and originals is reinforced by the cast-wax figures placed throughout the exhibition: his own head encased in Perspex vitrines like specimens for study (Emmental Head, 2003, and Anatomietransschizophrène, Trans-schizophrenic Anatomy, 1999) or placed on creepily miniaturized bodies wearing little-girl dresses in L’Inconséquence des gestes (The Inconsequence of gestures, 2003). This slippage pertains as much to translation as it does to visual copies: his macabre little Trou de balle dans la tête (2001), a tubular wax cast of the elements captured by the trajectory of a bullet through the head, including gnarly tissue and a tuft of hair, also plays on the fact that trou de balle (literally ‘bullet hole’) is French slang for ‘asshole’.
Barbier’s exhibition also includes two large-scale sculptural installations. Le Gateau (The Cake, 2004) is a cross-section of earth sliced into wedges, topped with artificial flora, through which plastic tapeworms with round red lips and white teeth burrow tunnels, consuming and undermining the structure. The Méga Maquette 2 (2006), modelled on the international space station, is an ambitious reduced spatialization of Barbier’s entire oeuvre (past, present and future), akin to a waist-high, room-size model train set. Reconstructed galleries are hung with miniatures of his graphic and three-dimensional works; a plastic bubble protects a lush landscape; rustic outhouses are perched on mountains because, Barbier writes, ‘they provide the most complete view of the project’. Tubes and garden hoses link these elements to an enormous hunk of Swiss cheese, while an obese reclining wax figure has patches of skin removed and transported across the space on metal wires, like laundry at the drycleaners.
Barbier’s self-representation here has been likened to Marcel Duchamp’s miniature museum the Boîte-en-Valise. The comparison is apt, but the excessive, obsessive nature of Barbier’s work rather recalls that of the visionary Facteur Cheval, a French postman who spent 34 years building a folly, his Palais Idéal, out of stones he collected along his route. Barbier’s exhibition, like Cheval’s ideal palace, comes off as a fascinating but fragile edifice seemingly built out of nothing but (im)pure products of the imagination.
Vivian Rehberg
